the aj blog

Steadicam Sketch

The Steadicam

Ah, the Steadicam. A miracle for the video industry. A horror for the no-budget hobbyist. Sure, this has probably been done before, but I have found (almost) nothing as beautiful as the original versions, such as those made by Tiffen. Who says that making it pretty has to be expensive?

Why?

The stability of professional stabilizers is unmatched in either software or camera internal stabilizers. Who wouldn’t want something that works that good? Oh, and professional models do all kinds of crazy things with little motors, but balancing the weight is the best easy method of stabilization. So I decided to try and recreate one of the lower-end basic no-trick steadicam models.

How?

One day when I was bored, I sketched out a DIY version in my journal. You can click on the thumbnail for a bigger picture. I estimated the cost to be around $40. Around 20 in random assorted hardware (think washers, nuts, and bolts) and like 20 in essential structural components (think aluminum tubing and plate). There’s also a lot of other random junk on the scan, so take it with a grain of salt.

The Disclaimer

I have plans to perform this and produce a video or something on it. Since I have documented and published these rough plans, I retain the copyright until further notice. Please, if you do anything involving this article or its assets, provide attribution and a link. There will be more updates as I progress further. Thanks for cooperating!

Deep Freeze, and the Deep Freeze logo are trademarks of Faronics Inc.

Deep Freeze

Yes, it is winter. And no, this has nothing even distantly to do with the climate. Faronics, a company seeming to specialize in computer management solutions, sells and offers trials of various products. One of their more amazing programs is called “Deep Freeze,” and you’ll see why in a minute. Deep Freeze literally “freezes” your hard drive. The genius in in its simplicity. By “freezing” a partition, no changes can be made to it. And since practically everything, except the BIOS, is stored on the disk, nothing can be changed. That means the Registry (if using Windows), Master Boot Record, Windows installation, bootloader, anything. Did I mention it’s available for both Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux?  Perfect.

Testing

I decided it was time to try it out. Faronics had a 30-day trial available, after which your computer would “thaw” and be forced to uninstall it. I made a text file on my desktop and rebooted. Gone. I installed a suspicious codec. Gone upon boot. I even tried to maim Deep Freeze its self and delete where it installed. Wait, where did it install? Hidden. Probably a secret partition not visible through Windows.

Conclusion

But why, why would I want to not be able to save any files? How is that useful? There are many scenarios you’d want this. Take a public computer. You want your computers to remain low-maintainence, but at the same time try not to restrict people too much. Load the computer with basic internet and word processing software, then freeze it with Deep Freeze. Upon reboot, everything is restored normal, history erased, user-generated files deleted. No anti-virus required, just regular reboots. Take your own computer for example. Don’t want to accidentally mess it up? Freeze your system partition, leave a separate “data” partition thawed. Need to install something? Thaw, install, reboot frozen. Finally, take a school. This was actually the first place I noticed it. Freeze the whole computer and put on a BIOS password. Domain login allows controlling your users at once. Use a login script to mount a folder for the specific user on a hosting server. By instructing the students to only save to the network drive, their work can be preserved and the workstation left untouched.