This week I got to test the new Moza AirCross gimbal. Of course, I’m mostly interested in how I can use it for my time- and hyperlapses 🙂 This gimbal has an advanced timelapse motion mode, which lets you execute shoot-move-shoot motion control shots. It’s the only one out there that can do such. However, today let’s take a look how it works for handheld hyperlapses.

The full tutorial on Handheld Gimbal Hyperlapse: Handheld Hyperlapse with a Gimbal [VIDEO TUTORIAL] 

For sure I’ll post a full review of this gimbal soon on the blog, if you don’t want to miss that, subscribe to notifications by hitting the little red bell in bottom left corner 🙂 You can check the specs and pre-order the gimbal here: Moza Aircross Gimbal Page

Now, check out my shot and read something about the settings and technique.


I made this shot with Sony A6300, MC-11 adapter, Sigma 10-20mm @10mm and as I already mentioned Gudsen Moza Aircross gimbal. It’s a one handed gimbal with an optional dual handle. Of course I used dual handle for that and I recommend – no matter what gimbal you use, it’s much better for the hyperlapse results to use the dual handle. The great option is that I can use a dummy battery provided by Gudsen to power my A6300 from the gimbal, which has 7.4V output right next to the camera. I was really scared about the A6300 battery life. Now at least on the gimbal I don’t need to worry about that 😉

I was shooting with an interval of 1 second with a free timelapse application from Open Memories pageIt’s a very simple application, but it suits my needs for gimbal work. It’s much faster than Sony app, however you don’t get the liveview during the shot and still you can’t change exposure parameters during the shot. For sure I will use that app for some shots 🙂 The shutter speed was at 0.5″. Exposure was fixed in manual settings, I need to brighten up the darker places using Lightroom and LRTimelapse.

The shot was done in YAW follow mode. Pitch and roll were of course locked. In this gimbal, same as in the one from the tutorial, there is a parameter called deadband. It’s very useful if you want to take turns during the hyperlapse. It’s an angle, that you can rotate the handle, and the gimbal won’t react. I set it to 12 degrees and set the lowest available follow speed. Then – I just followed my wife 🙂
This shot took me 11 minutes. For such long hyperlapse it’s crazy fast. The setup is much lighter than my previous gimbal, so my hands didn’t hurt. However it will probably depend, how often you skip the gym 😉 With native Sony glass this setup would be really light.

As usually with gimbals, the result was pretty nice (I mean usable ;)) straight out of camera, but decided to make a few adjustments to make it silky smooth. Warp Stabilizer doesn’t work very good on such shots, you need to adjust bumps manually. The most work I put in the ending of the shot – the movement was spontaneous and handheld gimbal hyperlapses aren’t the best for such complicated moves. It turned out this one is quite nice, I really like the result. Besides the ending movement there is a ‘static’ timelapse. It was me just holding the gimbal still in the hands. This is the only part that really requires stabilization in post. Well, handheld timelapse 😉 I could put the gimbal on the ground (the gimbal has a mini tripod legs attached on the bottom) to get perfectly stable timelapse on the end, but I didn’t want to change the perspective so much. Maybe I should plan to put it on some bench, but as I said, this part was totally spontaneous. I planned the shot till the 0:08, then I just tell “keep walking” to my wife 🙂
It’s already 50th shot! Now, when there is ‘5’ as the first digit, it’s getting serious 🙂 I can’t wait for the project summary I will post in two weeks. Enable the notification to be the first who see that! 🙂 Also, feel free to join my Facebook group and share your works there: http://facebook.com/groups/timelapse.hyperlapse

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