The Vaxis Movmax N2 Mini Pro car mounted camera system.
Lets go ahead and jump right in and show you the high speed footage that was captured at 55-75 mph on a freeway.
Overall it did great at those high speeds and I think where it suffered in image quality was actually from the Ronin RS2 lack of built in GPS stabilization and motor strength. The GPS module and adapter are something you can purchase separately.
First impressions
It is a well built and sturdy system. We never had any of the suction cups come loose while filming. We were reaching speeds of 80 mph. While the suction cups held, the footage at that extremely high speeds was unusable. We might have needed the larger silicon inserts but didn’t have those. Read the fine print for the pro system. It does not come with the larger silicon inserts. Footage for us was usable up to about 55-65 mph. The biggest downside was the lack of instructions on how to fine tune it for different situations but that is expected when ordering a product from overseas. We also did not have much time on the shoot to do this. I’ll go into motor settings later on.
Balancing the System
Here is a detailed list of how I balanced the system with the weight of what we were using. Since we use pounds in the states I have converted the Movmax charts for quick reference. I also broke down the weights for our different setups.
Gimbal Settings
After calibrating the gimbal increase stiffness about 20% and strength down to the lowest setting.
Power and Cable Management
Having mutileple D-Tap plugs available is a really nice feature for this rig. We ran power to the gimbal, FX6, and Teradek system and barely went through half a 98 wh battery for about two hours of filming.
Safety
Your first thought should not be of how to keep your camera safe but how to keep other vehicles on the road safe in the case of a worst case scenario happens where your rig or camera falls off of the car. So how do we achieve this? The rig comes with one ratchet strap and I recommend a minimum of one more. We ended up using a total of 3 ratchet straps and 3 safety cables. One rachtet strap as an anchor for if the rig came loose it would still be held onto the roof. The second one was used to attach the bottom suction cups to the back of the car. The third one was just for the camera and gimbal. The rig Movmax should have one or two safety cables and the gimbal and cameras should have another one.
If you have never done this before you should watch some videos about how to safely install a suction cup mounted car rig. There are also some tips on how to avoid damaging your paint with the suction cups.
Gimbal and Camera Control
We had a ps4 controller and the Tilta Remote Control Handle but ended up using the ps4 remote since it gave us more control over the roll axis which shifted on sharp turns.
We had a 10’ lanc cable that connected the FX6 side control handle to the camera so we had complete control over the camera settings and autofocus . We set the autofocus to spot and moved the spot in real time to where we wanted the focus.
Final Thoughts
I still need to do some testing to see if we can achieve good results over 55-65 mph but anything under that speed and we were able to achieve some great results that won’t need much if any stabilization in post. I also need to do some testing with the camera mounted on the side and front of the car. We had tried mounting it on the side but the gimbal began to significantly shake at around 40- 50 mph. I have yet to mount it on the front of the car but expect similar reactions to the side mount from the gimbal.
Please leave your experiences below in the comments section!