Can I Use the LiveU Solo With My Gyroscope or Other Rig?

There some great rigs available for holding, stabilizing or moving cameras these days, and many are inexpensive.  From the DJI Ronin to one-handed gyroscopes to mini-dollies.  Some of you have asked, can I use the LiveU Solo with such devices?

Its About Balance

The Solo is quite light weight, but to a gyroscope that is trying to stabilize a camera, it could still be too heavy for such devices - causing the stabilization on the device to not work, or the motion to not be as smooth.  Ideally, for any rig that relies heavily on balance, you are not mounting the Solo on the camera or the rig and instead or using a cable with a bit of slack in it, and the Solo places off the rig entirely.

This lets you preserve the balance of the rig. The Solo itself is quite rugged so if it was just a worry of the Solo falling or getting knocked around, this would be ok, but many such rigs rely on very precise balance of the camera, and you want to preserve that balance for it to work well.

Cold Shoe Mount

A cold show mount accessory is available from https://shop.liveu.tv.  In this scenario, the weight of the Solo is placed directly above the camera in a place the camera intends to add an accessory, so balance is often better.  Its possible your rig can support the solo mounted directly on the camera in this way, since the weight is right where you want it. But build in time in your plans to test this before relying on it, just in case it creates too much "top weight" on the setup.

Conclusion

You can use your Solo with many different rigs and gimbals, but a little testing and understanding the way the rig or gimbal balances the camera is important to insuring your chosen configuration will work well.  Where it doesn't, you can use the solo distance from the camera using a longer cable and a bit of slack to support movement, and you can have the encoder entirely separate from the camera as well.