Hear, hear! Too little imagination on the part of the director, and too little craftsmanship. It reminds me of the films of the '60s and '70s when zoom lenses were novel devices.
Me, I prefer to carefully set up a shot and shoot from a tripod.
You mean people don’t like a one minute long fight scene with a shakey camera and 100 close up shots from different angles?
I’d be interested in watching a “fixed” version of the Bourne trilogy.
I think the problem with amateur videos is…they’re amateur. When I have to do hand-held video work, I am sure to turn the electronic stabilizer on, and just take a lot of care when I move the camera. Smooth, slow motion, no sudden jumps. If I want it faster, I can always speed it up in post.
And I sometimes use a poor-man’s steadycam (just a couple of pipes and a weight), but it’s more of a hassle than without.
On the last project, the director/writer had an actual full-on SteadiCam. He got some good shots with it. When I do hand-held, I position myself such that the camera is braced as much as possible. That way you get some movement, but no shaking. It’s easier with the Aaton or the Eclair, since the magazine rests on the shoulder.
I’m not talking about amateur videos - I’m talking about major studio releases (i.e. made by people who should know better).
If you look carefully, you can find amateur priced cameras with manual features. The main way to get professional looking results is learn how to manually set focus, exposure, white balance and audio levels. That, and get a decent tripod.
It gets a lot of bad reviews, but I’ve had very good results with the Modosteady I mentioned earlier. I believe the bad reviews are due to it being so inexpensive that it attracts a mediocre quality of reviewer who doesn’t take the time to set it up properly (the dreadful “manual” doesn’t help). The gimbal is nowhere near as good as the one on the Merlin, but a little oil smoothed it out, and watching the various Merlin videos on YouTube on adjusting the “drop time” helped me get it properly balanced.
I’m aware that I could build my own, but I bought this sucker on E-Bay for $50, and it folds up so crazy small that I’m able to stick it in the tiny bag that my Canon camera came with.
There’s a freeware plugin for Virtualdub available for this function:
http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm
It doesn’t just crop out a non-shaky bit, or add black borders, it creates some sort of scene map, so that missing edges from one frame can be filled in from parts of another. Doesn’t always work very well when there are lots of things moving about in a scene, but for footage consisting largely of one or two objects moving against a static background, it’s quite impressive.
I used it to deshake some video of me in my boat, which was shot handheld on long zoom - it’s still not entirely brilliant to watch, but before deshaking, it hurt to look at it.
The video is embedded here:
http://www.atomicshrimp.com/st/content/boat_12
There are two major reasons for the excessive use of ShakyCam:
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They figured out how to do it with CGI. One of the clues that something was obvious CGI in the past was that the camera had to sit still or have very basic movements.
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People have seen quite a lot of home videos, and those are shaky, while the professional stuff is not. So people have subconsciously associated shaky with being more real. Sure, it’s not what we human beings actually see, but it is what we’d see if we were filming everything we saw.
For anyone who quickly scanned and got bored with this link, the effect is shown at 2:54.
Gaffa, that Manfrotto looks intriguing. I’ll have to look into it.
The one I really want is the newest “mini” by Steadicam, the Pilot (demo by Garrett Brown). At $5,000, it’s a bit out of my price range, but the ones that attach to a body harness are the way to go.
Certainly any movie studio that doesn’t use one is doing it intentionally for effect. All of the traveling shots nowdays that can’t be dollied or craned use a steadycam.
I’ll be using it for a concert shoot in the next few weeks, and I’ll post some footage.
The Merlin is the “cheap” Steadicam, but at $800 it is way out of my price range. There is a vest and arm for the Merlin as well, but at $1500 is even further out.
I’ve been a professional Steadicam® Operator for 24 years. Few demands from a director are more painful than, " Can you do it again but make it less…you know… less steady? "
It isn’t an aesthetic. It’s laziness.
Yes, the cropping issues are significant with the frame - to - frame software. Yields some astonishing results, though.
Greengrass. Whatta hack. 
Cartooniverse
Have you played with the Tango yet?
Would you be willing to do an “Ask The Steadicam Operator” thread?
Better yet, can you be our direct line to people making movies, and tell them that we don’t want everything to shake all the time when we’re watching a movie? (I know the answer is probably “no.” 
)
Yes I would. Re: Tango…let’s take it off boards. PM me ?
No.
Ah! I’d forgotten about that video. I was the Steadicam Operator shooting Garrett that day at B&H so aside from a few hand-held bits shot by the B&H videographer, the piece is my footage.
We had a lot of fun, and showed both Pilot and Flyer LE rigs. I suspect the Flyer LE video was also streamed by B&H. Always a trick, moving quickly through that crowded store with a rig. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sweat seeing people’s faces. They took care of that in post.
I think Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness made brilliant use of shakey cam. I love how when the characters would fall down to the ground in a scuffle, so would the camera man. And the constant close up/ back up shots were funny as hell too.
Are you the beardy guy we catch a glimpse of in the monitor?
Aw…
Shakes, it’s not that there isn’t a place in movie making for shakey-cam; it’s just movies that overuse it that make me irritated. And trying to watch our favourite movies from the shakey-cam overuse years are going to irritate me every time I pull them out - “Why is everything shaking? They’re just discussing where to have breakfast!”
We watched “Red” last weekend (two thumbs up, by the way - how is it possible for Bruce Willis to be getting more handsome as he ages?), and I think my next rant is going to be about the overuse of cameras moving in circles around the action in a scene. The cameras just went around and around and around like the actors were on a merry-go-round.