camera slider

25 Articles

Camera Slider

Camera Slider Utilizes Skateboard Trucks

April 9, 2015 by 17 Comments

[Peter] wanted a camera slider and found some inspiration on the good ole ‘net. He then gathered some parts and came up with his own design. We’ve seen camera sliders made from roller blade wheels before but never one that uses skateboard trucks as the carriage! On each truck axle are 2 bearings spaced apart without the skate wheels. Each pair of bearings rides on one of two 48 inch long closet rods supported between two push-up stands. The top portion from an old camera tripod makes a handy mount that allows adjustment of the camera’s aim.

Some camera sliders are manual operated. This one, however, is lead screw driven with a goal of keeping the camera moving at a constant rate. A disassembled hand drill provides the motor, gearbox and speed control necessary to turn the lead screw. Although it works well at slow speeds, [Peter] admits that it becomes less usable as the speed increases. This is mainly due to the 5/16 inch threaded rod lead screw oscillating and whipping around after reaching a certain RPM. If you stick with a straight run, a belt-driven system might make those faster movements more smoothly.

A Simple But Elegant Time-Lapse Camera Slider

February 4, 2015 by 9 Comments

Time-lapse photography is always a fun way to show off the build process of a project – but sometimes it can get a bit boring and repetitive. To add a new dynamic, why not try a moving time-lapse? It’s not actually that hard to build a time-lapse slider rig. And you can do it with, or without a microcontroller.

[Charlie] built this slider rig out of square aluminum tube stock which is cheap and easy to work with. It’s also a great candidate for using pop-rivets which can speed up the assembly considerably. The camera bogey uses aluminum angle stock with skateboard bearings to ride along the track. Altogether the rig is four feet long and about 6″ wide.

To pull the camera back and forth, [Charlie] has a 0.5RPM geared motor from Servo-City which results in a travel time of about 5400 seconds (90 minutes). While there aren’t any demo videos of the rig in action, we imagine it’d produce some pretty clean motion. And thanks to its rigid construction, the camera can be pulled upside down, on angles, and even vertically.

MacGyver Made IKEA Camera Slider

February 17, 2014 by 12 Comments

It’s not hard to drastically increase the production value in your videos by adding a camera slide to your shot — in fact, [Derek] shows us how to make a decent camera slide using parts from IKEA for less than $30.

The hack makes use of a cutting board, glider and hook accessories, a triple curtain rail, and two ceiling fixtures. The ceiling fixtures are simply used to make a mount for the curtain rail to rest on. [Derek] shows us an easy way to make the carriage with some careful drilled holes in the cutting board — he’s added a 3D printed tripod head for mounting the camera, but really you can use whatever you want.

It’s a pretty simple and easy to build rig, and the results are quite impressive — just check out the following video to see!

Continue reading “MacGyver Made IKEA Camera Slider” →

Yet Another DIY Camera Slider

January 27, 2014 by 9 Comments

Professional camera gear is expensive, which is probably why there is such a huge DIY field for camera equipment. Here’s another great DIY camera slider that you can build for cheap.

Similar to other rigs we’ve seen, the heart of this design makes use of skateboard wheels — they’re cheap, have good bearings, and are easy to mount. He’s created a dolly for them using a T-strap bracket, which is used for wood framing — the wheels mount directly to it without any modification.

What we think is unique about this build are the rails [Shootr] decided to use. They’re U-Post fence posts — strong, rigid, and probably one of the cheapest forms of processed metal you can buy. To hold them together, he’s using a threaded rod with two pieces of 1/2″ square steel tubing, bracing the fence posts. This wedges the dolly in between them with just enough slack to slide smoothly back and forth.

The other method of making a camera slider like this is using tubular rails, which also allows you to add a curve in your camera track. And if you’re looking for a precise, 2-axis camera dolly… you should check out this one!