DIY Cable Cam for GoPro Cameras and DSLRs Made with Zipline Ball Bearing Pulleys

How to Shoot Smooth Footage with Your GoPro and a DIY Steadicam
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I don't necessarily recommend this setup for your GoPro cable cam.

Why? Because it's not cheap.

We got these professional zipline pulleys from the owner of a zipline park in our home city. It may have helped that we shot a video that benefited him even though someone else was the client.

My point is he's a genuine dude who just wanted to help and he spared us the expense of buying these. They're more than $100 each.


However, if you can get your hands on some second hand ball bearing pulleys, you'll be on your way to building an awesome cable cam rig.

What I like about this design:

• Easy to put on the rope
• Easy to take off (no need to untie the rope)
• Easy to secure (just pop a carabiner and your camera is safe)

Update: As you can see, most of the moving shots are grainy - due to low light in the forest and the Moiré effect. We need better cameras for this kind of shooting.

We also damaged the tripod head, that's why some shots are shaky (the thing became loose due to the numerous shocks and the end of the line). Not to mention that I almost destroyed my compact Sony - the tripod mounting socket started to bulge out (basically my cam would have broken into pieces after another shock).

I'll update this post with a MTB video + behind the scene footage. Meanwhile, enjoy this teaser - we shot it with the ugly looking improvised rig - the only difference is that we used one of these ball bearing pulleys, not the red one that you see in the picture (that runs on lubricated bushings, which didn't spin smooth enough).

The image quality is not the best, since my compact Sony HX9V has this autofocus function which is constantly on in video mode. We do have better footage though - taken with a Canon 60D and a GoPro HD 3 Black Edition - but we'll keep that for the final edit.



Now that we have the two pulleys mounted 40 cm apart on the aluminum rod, we hope the camera will be more stable. Our plan is to add an arm which will hold a tripod head - thus we'll be able to mount any type of camera on the rig (including a DSLR)


I used to be a climber (I still am I guess, on a limited basis) so I have ropes, carabiners and other gear like that. That helps - we used a 50 meters long 8.5 mm half rope, a Grigri and an Ascension rope clamp to tighten the line.


With this extra bracket (see pics below) + the cam that is mounted on it, the center of gravity of the whole rig is below the pulleys. This makes it more stable.




Update: The safest way (that we could come up with) to attach a DSLR was to take the pipe + tripod head and clamp it onto the lateral flat-stock frame. We used two hose clamps for that. The tripod head allows us to rotate and tilt the camera in any direction we want - this helps a lot when you want to frame your subject in a certain way.




Drop a comment if you have questions. Cheers!

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