First day filming with Feiyu G4 Gimbal and GoPro Hero4

At about this time last year I bought a Feiyu G4 gimbal so that I could get stabilized footage from my GoPro.

This video shows some of the footage that we were able to get from the first day we took the gimbal out snowboarding.

I opened the gimbal up the night before, but only had a quick look at the instructions, so we just took it out to give it a test of what the footage would come out like.

Watching the footage on the big tv when we got back was actually quite impressive, it does a good job of smoothing out the footage, no matter who is filming.

From the start of the video you can see us skating down the road, but the camera hardly shows any shaking at all, it does a good job of cancelling out any up and down movements I had.

It takes a while to get used to panning the camera, as it seems it has a little bit of a second delay in panning left to right (which it is doing to stabilize the left and right movement), but once you see how it works, it isn’t hard to plan ahead.

If you know that someone you want to film is going to be passing you quickly, you learn to start pointing the gimbal to where they will be, which makes up for the time it takes to pan. When you get it right the footage can look really good.

On big wide groomed runs, it is pretty clear how well it can stabilize everything. Once you get to rougher terrain and tight trees, it really starts to show how well it works. You can just focus on your own riding, and point it vaguely at what you want to film, and it does the rest for you.

Cold Weather

I was interested to see how the gimbal did in the cold weather, because GoPros have a terrible battery life in the cold. Seeing that the gimbal only fits the GoPro without the waterproof case, I figured that the battery life was only going to get worse. I have the original GoPro battery, as well as two Smatree batteries that do a much better job than the battery that comes with the camera.

It was a fairly cold day, around -10 or -11c which was a good test for the gimbal. The gimbal takes two batteries in the handle, and comes with 4 total, so I had them all charged up and ready to go.

Surprisingly, it had no problem lasting the whole day. Whenever we were heading up the lift, I put the gimbal to sleep/standby, and woke it up when we were ready to film. I went through two GoPro batteries, and the gimbal didn’t even start to flash the low battery lights. Since then I haven’t ever bothered to take out the second set of batteries, the one set lasts long enough for us to film for the day.