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One of the best products I’ve picked up recently for shooting video is the DJI Osmo Mobile 2. It’s a camera gimbal for your smartphone, which works frickin’ amazing for capturing steady video.
We’ve been using a DJI Osmo Mobile 2 to capture all of our event videos since GDC, and it’s ridiculous what a difference it has made in actually being able to do longer over-the-shoulder videos without them being a shaky mess. The DJI Osmo Mobile 2 does this using the same gimbal magic they use in their drones to always keep your iPhone pointing at the same thing regardless of how much you bob around.
Check out this basic video on how it all works:
We primarily use these things for what might be the most boring use for a camera gimbal, but people who are more into shooting video utilize the various features of the DJI app to do all their different time lapse and other visual tricks… Including hyperlapse. Here’s another video that demonstrates all these features:
The thing I love most about the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 is it’s one of those devices that is as complicated as you want it to be. For my purposes, I toss my phone in it and just use the basic iOS camera app to record video. This works totally fine, and the controls work over Bluetooth (except for zoom, that only works in the DJI app). Inside the DJI app, you can do complicated things like tracking of a subject to always automatically keep them in frame and all the other things shown off in the above video.
Most of all, it really just blows me away how cheap this technology has become. When I first started shooting iPhone gameplay videos a decade ago the camera setup I had to do it was huge, expensive, and really difficult to move around. Now days? My iPhone X is an incredibly capable video camera, and these gimbal accessories now cost less than $150 compared to this tech a decade ago basically being unaffordable to anyone but professionals. We are living in some pretty neat times!
Thanks for checking out today’s Amazon Item of the Day, and as mentioned before, even if you’re not interested in this particular product, buying things from Amazon by first visiting toucharcade.com/amazon is immensely helpful in supporting the site at no additional cost to you. If you want to take things a step further, you can check out our Patreon, but either way we just appreciate you sticking with us and continuing to both visit and contribute to the TouchArcade community over the years! If you’ve got a product you’re interested in seeing featured in an Amazon Item of the Day, don’t hesitate to reach out. The best way to get in contact with us is via email at [email protected] and be sure to include “Amazon Item of the Day" in the subject.
