This Gigantic 1970s Camera Gyro Shows How Far Tech Has Come
The BBC recently shared a fascinating news report from all the way back in 1970, which featured a state-of-the-art camera accessory at the time: a gyro-stabilized camera.
To test it out, reporter John Parry first tried getting a shot of an off-road motorcycle while the cameraman was on top of a military truck.
Unsurprisingly, the shot was shaky, jarring, and unusable. However, this is where Parry introduces the “remote-controlled gyro-balanced camera platform,” a giant glass-fiber ball that houses the camera and gyros and is attached to a suspended boom.
“This irons out the last of the vibrations,” Parry says as he points to the gyros. “Inside it, there are three gyros controlling movement in three dimensions for roll, pitch, and yaw.”
A television camera is attached to the film camera, which transmits a live feed to a remote monitor where the cameraman sits and views the shot. From the cameraman’s position, he can control the camera via a console that can adjust focus, zoom, pan, and tilt. I
The difference is night and day as demonstrated by the BBC showing a stable shot of the off-road motorcycle filmed from the military vehicle.
“The great advantage of this system is the remote camera control,” adds Parry. “Without the added weight of a cameraman, the module can be easily mounted onto the roof of a car or the hook of a crane and still give perfectly stable pictures under the most rugged conditions.”
At the end of the report, Parry jokes in his cut-glass Received Pronunciation, “Alas, the 8mm home movie version is yet to be developed.”
Of course, gyros ultimately did arrive in consumer-friendly cameras but not for another 30 years when the technology became available much smaller than the giant ball seen on the news report.
In the early 2000s, Sony Handycams began featuring ‘Super SteadyShot,’ which utilized internal gyros to shift optical elements and stabilize video.
Now, we have drones that deliver super smooth shots and gimbals that can be attached to smartphones for buttery video.
“Hello 1970, I’m from the future and we have this tech in the palm of our hands today,” writes one wisecracking commenter.
The Hubble Space Telescope had six gyroscopes on board when it launched in 1990 which it used to position itself for celestial targets. Nowadays, there is only one gyro still working, making it difficult to operate.
Image credits: BBC