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TAKING THE BUMPS OUT OF THE MOVIES Part Two – by Barrie Smith Seemingly unable to stop inventing more technology, Garrett Brown developed Steadicam® into more and more models. He then came up with radical ways of moving a camera above and across a sports field, down into a pool as a diver descends and tracking with swimmers as they move from one end of the pool to the other. T hese days there seems to be a Steadicam for almost every need, user and budget. Way down the bottom of the list is the Merlin model that is tailored for camcorders that weigh between 200g and 2.2kg. Shaped as a hinged, curved tube that weighs less than a can of Coke, Merlin can be handheld or attached to a vest. It is priced at around $1000. Steadicam Pilot resembles a ‘junior’ To satisfy the need for a low cost stabiliser, Garrett Brown came up with the Merlin model, suitable for camcorders that weigh between 200g and 2.2kg. If fitted, the camera’s internal stabiliser must be switched off as it can introduce delays in panning and tilting. 22  Silicon Chip Steadicam in its setup and appearance, based around the vest, iso-elastic arm and sled. It can carry a camera weighing between 900g and 4.5kg. Another current model is one that Brown admits to thinking about in his early inventive beginnings. Steadicam Tango is a novelty in that, although based on the vest, arm and sled, the visible ‘extra’ is a jib arm that can rise from floor level to ceiling height. It’s also able to make 360° pans with ±90° tilts all around. Camera weight range: 2.3 - 11kg. Amazingly, there is even a budget Steadicam made for mobile phones that shoot video. Amateur camcorders? Maybe soon. Price: $US179. The top models are the Ultra 2 and Ultra 2c, used by high end operators around the Steadicam Pilot incorporates the vest, iso-elastic arm and sled. It can carry a camera weighing between 900g and 4.5kg. Top of the Steadicam range models are the Ultra 2 and Ultra 2c, which can support 5.4-31.7kg of camera. siliconchip.com.au world. They can carry 5.4 to 31.7kg of camera. Price: around $US66,000 with “all the bells and whistles.” Video at: www.lemac.com.au/video/ Steadicam.mov It seems the sky is the limit for extensions of the Steadicam principle as the camera can now soar above sports grounds and dive deep into Olympic pools. SkyCam According to one of his Australian associates “Garrett just can’t stop inventing!” Having totted up 50 patents worldwide for camera-associated inventions, devices like Steadicam, MobyCam, DiveCam, MoleCam, a new creation, SkyCam, earned him a 2005 Academy Award nomination. As with Steadicam, the idea for SkyCam was born on a film set. During the shooting of the Little House on the Prairie TV series, Brown had the idea of a camera that could fly high above the action and move freely in a large three dimensional space. So it was in 1984, the first use of aerial cable technology for motion pictures was seen, on the set of Birdy, a movie about a young Vietnam veteran who returns home obsessed with birds. SkyCam is now a commonplace element in any sports coverage, first appearing in February for NBC’s 2001 football coverage. In operation, SkyCam resembles a flying Steadicam, able to support a stabilised camera, thanks to a cablerigged support. Whereas Steadicam is limited by the movement of the human operator, the range of SkyCam’s movement seems boundless. The crew is a SkyCam pilot plus a camera operator and assistants. The pilot moves the rig through space, as the operator moves the camera on its remote head. They sit side by side and work closely together. Three components drive SkyCam: the central computer control, the spar (or central support and counterbalanced camera column) and the reel (motor drive and cables). These components are linked through the use of a highly complex fibre optic network. Each of the three parts works in tandem to move the supported camera to virtually any location and at any angle. It is the only stabilised camera system that can unobtrusively fly anywhere in a defined three-dimensional space. SkyCam rides on four cables. These are made from a braided Kevlarjacketed single mode optical fibre with conductive copper elements and capable of supporting 270kg. Each is attached through a ring at the top of a tall tower or mounting platform of some kind, up in the air. Basically, the higher you can mount the four wires and farther from each other you can place them, the larger the three dimensional space it can work in. Each cable carries fibre-optic signalling from the camera operator. The SkyCam pilot operates the spooling out and taking up of each. The degree of slack and take up is what determines the height of SkyCam, with a computer ensuring they stay (Inset): Steadicam Tango monitor. Steadicam Tango has a jib arm that cranes from floor to ceiling, making it the near-perfect production tool. locked together. Each reel is a cable spool with 3.4kW motor and disc brake with its own computer, capable of .01 inch positioning resolution. The camera’s view itself is operated by remote head technology, handling focus, lens aperture and zoom; the link is SkyCam resembles a flying Steadicam, able to support a stabilised camera, thanks to a cable-rigged support. The original patents have now expired. siliconchip.com.au December 2011  23 by radio and an auto-ranging dish mounted near the top of an arena. It is driven by a Windows XP computer that provides camera flight and video control and obstacle avoidance. SkyCam was acquired by Winnercomm, Inc in 2004 and was then taken over by the parent company of the Outdoor Channel in 2009. “SkyCam” is a trademarked name, and properly refers to one company and their equipment. However, with the expiry of the original patents, other companies have entered the market and the term is mistakenly used as a generic reference for any cable-controlled camera system. Fox Sports refers to their system as the DLP Ultimate Picture Cam. SkyCam and systems like it have been in limited use since the mid 1980s when the technology was first patented but until the mid 1990s, progress was slow due to limitations in computer and servo motor technology. All SkyCam patents have now expired, except one “quite valuable one” from 2000. There are about “half a dozen clones” scattered around the globe. Watch the demo at www.skycam.tv/folders.asp? action=display&record=3 MobyCam The world saw MobyCam splash into the pool at the Steadicam Smoothee… a budget Steadicam made for the rest of us! Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Enclosing a video camera, the 60cm long submarine housing travels between lanes four and five (closest to the top-seeded swimmers) on the black line at the bottom of the pool. The camera’s progress is controlled by a mechanical pulley system. According to Brown, this kept the system simple and less likely to startle any “jumpy electrical inspectors” that might have kept MobyCam out The Inventive Mr Brown Meeting Garrett Brown at Sydney SMPTE, I asked him why he seems to have an almost compulsive need to invent. “Well it’s a serial issue, a serial problem. It comes up because I’m in the habit of understanding that if you want something, the primary inventive act is discovering something that’s missing. If you can take for granted that something’s missing that you want, the act of inventing something is actually pretty joyful. It’s the follow up that can get painful. But the act of inventing something frequently isn’t as difficult as you’d imagine. In some cases it’s absurdly easy. The real trick is not skidding right on by. Let me show you an invention that I lug around with me that’s the perfect example. I love to invent personal things. My life is full of stuff that are one of a kind. Now and then I need reading glasses if I’m in a dark restaurant. I hate lugging a glasses case around just to have reading glasses. So I decided I wanted my reading glasses in my wallet. So I came up with this item and paid a jeweller to build this thing. So I have it with me all the time. It slips into my wallet and I’ve got very comfortable reading glasses and they do the job.” Once you’ve invented something, you’ve made a sample. Stateside or in 24  Silicon Chip Australia what are the problems of taking it to a patent stage? “Stateside there appeared recently a thing called the Provisional Patent that can be as primitive as you want. It’s the equivalent of the old game when we were kids. The folklore was that if you drew or wrote it up and you linked drawings and described it, then you mailed it to yourself, registered mail, you had at least established a date, which is a very imprecise process. The patent office’s Provisional Patent is more or less the same thing: you write it up and illustrate it as well as you can and file one. I’ve fallen into the habit of doing that and I believe there are international things that are similar. So what you get is a year from that date. That establishes your date for whatever is in that package. A year later you have to file a regular patent or give it up. But at least it gives you a year to fuss with it and see if it’s valuable. I have been doing this long enough that I can pretty much do these myself, then hand them over to my long time attorneys and they just file them. With all my Steadicam stuff we almost always do a provisional patent. And that’s not terribly frightening, so I would recommend to anybody who has the bug to invent and they think it’s ‘date sensitive’, if they want to control the date. Humans are always inventing stuff. If it’s in the wind somebody will come up with it. But I don’t even bother searching them. I just control the date, then decide how valuable it is, then if the real date comes around a year later, you have to file it internationally and the whole bit. And it is an enormous pain in the ass – patents. The US patent laws are under attack by businesses because they want it less inventor-friendly and more businessfriendly. The laws are about to change. It’s a siliconchip.com.au MobyCam is a 60cm long submarine housing that encloses a video camera and travels at the bottom of a competition swimming pool. of the pool in Spain. As operator, Brown estimates he drove it 30km in Barcelona. To see a MobyCam video go to www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MSAG861sr2A DiveCam This device appeared in 1996 at the Atlanta Olympic Games. It’s an air-filled tube carrying a wide-angle lens camera which rides up and down on rails, pulled along by a wire and a pulley. Camera tilt is controlled remotely as it drops and the entire tube can be panned, both actions handled by the operator’s joystick. At the exact moment the diver leaves the board, an operator releases a wire, allowing the camera to drop. Thanks to gravity, both reach the water at the same time, traveling Feeling the need for reading spectacles that he can carry in his wallet, Brown came up with his version of a pincenez. He admits to hating the need to lug a glasses case around “just to have reading glasses. So I decided I wanted my reading glasses in my wallet.” hideous situation for a lone inventor. I have 50-60 patents. Some of them have expired. The original patents on the Steadicam and the SkyCam have all expired. Which is a shock. You can’t renew a patent but all the improvements you’ve made are patentable. So people are free to make the original primitive Steadicam. There are 40 of those in the world. But they’re not free to make anything based on our improvements. And those we go after in countries where we have taken out those patents. When I got my first patent, which was siliconchip.com.au at approximately 40km/h, to deliver viewers a side view of the diver hitting the water. The camera is also remotely controllable to pan up or down slightly. The operator watches the pelvis of the swimmer on a monitor. No other body part will do: there’s no point in watching the head or the legs, as they’re moving too quickly, depending on the dive being performed. You can see a demo at www.you First seen in 1996 in Atlanta, Divecam tube.com/watch?v tracks the path of a high diver =DDped9n5_vk plunging into the pool, traveling at SC approximately 40 km/h. issued in 1977, for a Steadicam, I looked at the expiration (sic) date and I thought to myself, this will run until I’m 53. I’ll probably be dead by then! Well the date came up and I was very much alive and very shocked to see that thing expire. But that’s the way the system works. You get your monopoly briefly.” What are the challenges in taking to the next step? To make a model and then go to manufacture? “First of all, you rely on the inventive quality of the idea. If it’s really invented, which means you have some property in that. We call it laughingly ‘intellectual property’. And if the idea is valuable. Is what you wanted valuable to somebody else? If you’re inventing because you want one, that’s a brilliant motive. And frankly if you want it, it’s statistically likely there are lots of other people who want it. But don’t invent for money because that’s a very slippery slope. If you imagine somebody else might want it but you don’t necessarily want it, you’re in big trouble. Then watch out of course for all the predatory people who lurk around looking for opportunities. You’ll see ads ‘Let us market your invention’, they’ll tell you. Most of those, if not scams, are very unimpressive in terms of results. If I were using the glasses for an example I would take that to manufacturers and try and find who is the friendliest soul who makes something closest to what you have come up with and what manufacturer would benefit from making this. And then make a frontal assault on these guys. And the first thing they’re going to say is ‘No we’re not interested.’ Or they want you to sign a nondisclosure agreement to prevent them from being sued if they do anything that may be similar. In some cases you have no choice but to sign it. But the second part of this package is that you have to be willing to spend a little dough. If inventing is on your mind, think of it as a hobby. If your hobby was antique cars you’d spend money on it. If your hobby was fishing you’d spend money on it. But people are astoundingly reluctant to spend their own dough on an invention. So you should spend money to get the prototype built well. A machinist is your best friend. You come in with a sketch and he’ll build you something. File a Provisional Patent. One step at a time. But spend your own dough on it. That’s a sign of how serious you are. Inventing is actually a lovely hobby. Seriously it is. If you start to populate your life … my boat, everything is full of one of a kind stuff. It’s really fun. So you have the joy of owning it, whatever it is and you may have the prospect of making some money. But do it in that order: own one first.” December 2011  25