My wife and I recently purchased a motorized time-lapse pan head. If you don’t know what that is it basically is a fancy egg timer that gives your camera a steady pan while it shoots.
A say fancy egg timer and I mean it. A common “hack” for replicating this device is literally attaching a camera onto an egg timer! But let’s be clear, a quality motorized time-lapse pan head gives you far more control than an egg timer!
We purchased the VidPro MH-360. It includes a phone holder and a GoPro mount adapter both which attach to the ¼-20 thread on the top! The rechargeable battery is a nice feature meaning you won’t always be looking for AA’s! It allows for selection from the following options:
- Angle of rotation – 15, 30, 45, 60, 90, 180 and 360 degrees
- Time – 5, 15, 30, 60 minutes
- Direction – Clockwise & Counterclockwise
Basically you can choose which of the three setting you want for your shot, whether it’s a camera taking multiple still images or a camera recording video that can be sped up later. So for example you could set it to rotate 90 degrees, over 5 minutes, rotating counterclockwise. It’s this level of control that you don’t get with the egg timer which is fixed in it’s rotational speed and direction.
To experiment we chose to go out onto some local dirt roads less than an hour from our house and see if we could catch some nice video and pictures of the sunsetting.
I botched the photography part because I forgot the SLR battery at home. Oops! But we attached the MH-360 onto a Gorilla Pod and a GoPro onto the MH-360. The Gorilla Pod was then attached to our front bumper. We set the MH-360 to rotate 90 degrees over 30 minutes rotating clockwise.
You can see the resulting video, which was sped up, gives just enough motion to the video to be interesting. The rotation is smooth and constant throughout. Ignore the light bumps which were caused by us opening and closing the car door. Note that the GoPro automatically changed the exposure settings during filming as it got darker which is why you see the exposure step a few times. Something to keep in mind that the GoPro will do if the lighting conditions are changing!
Overall I like the MH-360 for giving those otherwise vanilla shots just a little something extra. While I don’t bring it out for all our trips I bring it along when I anticipate a certain type of shot like this would be nice. So on a action packed weekend not so much, but when the weekend will have calm scenes that I want to capture this helps make those shots more interesting.
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