Sony 200-600mm Lens on a DJI Ronin RS3 Pro Video

Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. We’re now able to balance the huge Sony 200-600mm lens and A7iii in a lightweight handheld gimbal, the DJI Ronin RS3 Pro. Mental.

Sony 200-600mm lens on a DJI Ronin RS3 Pro

Why?

Well, I’m not exactly sure, but after some mucking around at home to prove that it was possible, I went out to do some video testing.

Now, if you wanted to test a small telescope on a 3-axis gimbal, where should you go? Or rather, where should you definitely not go? How about a thick dark woodland on a breezy, dull, overcast day? Roger that. I like a challenge.

Balancing

This was surprisingly easy. The Sony 200-600mm lens balances on the DJI Ronin RS3 Pro with ease. I used the long camera plate and two screws to fix the mount of the lens directly to it. I ditched the riser, you won’t be needing that. If anything, the weight of the 200-600mm with a Sony Alpha means it should probably sit a little lower in the arm if it were possible. Perhaps there’s a different lens mount you could use, but maybe that would introduce an extra tilt limitation… anyway, the way I did it works just fine. The standard lens mount fixed directly to the Ronin plate. It’ll give you a bit of a tilt limitation, but that’s easily overcome in the settings, and it’s not like this is a rig that you’re gonna be running around with worrying about hitting the end stops.

There’s plenty of front-to-back adjustment available, and the DJI Ronin RS3 Pro makes this an absolute pleasure, with their new little thumbscrew adjuster. Other gimbal manufacturers take note, all gimbals should come with these easy adjustment screws.

DJI Ronin RS3 Pro tilt adjustment with a big lens

For a good tilt balance, you’ll need the tilt set not only on the horizon, but also looking up and down. This is important. Important, but unfortunately somewhat restricted on this setup due to the length of the Sony 200-600. So you’ll want to do this as best as you can. I lean the tripod over one way, 45 degrees or so, and set it that way, you could wedge the base with something, or get someone to help you, but with a bit of practice, it’s easy enough to do quickly and on your own. Check the horizontal tilt again, and make any fine adjustments with the thumbscrew. That wonderful new thumbscrew.

After that, your roll balance should be pretty straightforward, and then your pan balance too. The RS3 Pro is a monster, it takes the Sony 200-600mm easily. I even tried it at home with the Raveneye and the focus motor attached, it was fine, although I ditched these as I couldn’t see the point in this testing scenario. I’m still trying to find a use for those in general…

Considering I was balancing this on an old wooden bench in the woods, on mud, and wearing wellies, it was a breeze. It took less than 5 minutes, and after turning the gimbal on and heading to the in-built balance checker thingymajigga, it all looked good. Pan and tilt were indicating a spot-on balance, and the roll balance was slightly off, but I went with it anyway.

Calibration

Calibrating the RS3 Pro with a big zoom lens

Some prior testing had indicated that it may struggle in “normal” mode, and that I should use “SuperSmooth”. Fine by me, I think it just works a little harder and runs the battery down quicker. Absolutely no problem, I don’t want to be carrying this big heavy thing around for hours on end anyway.

It calibrates ok. I ran through a normal calibration, and then a SuperSmooth calibration. I’ve no idea if you need to do that, but it feels good.

It ramped the pan and tilt stiffness right up to maximum and left the roll a little lower. I think this translates as the Ronin knows it’s a bloody big heavy lens…

Something you may notice with high stiffness values is that you get some vibration on looser mounts, as was the case here. This is common with gimbals, you’ll often see high stiffness values creating some resonating vibration-like movement in the gimbal and mount in certain scenarios. It creates a bit of fibrillation, and fights itself and the “sponginess” of the mount. We see that here in the video, it calibrates fine and then chucks out a warning message of poor control, and you can see and hear the motors having an issue as it fights itself.

Often this is down to the mount not having enough resistance to properly allow the gimbal to do its thing. I’ve seen it on vehicles and aircraft, where a gimbal is working fine while moving, under some wind resistance, and constantly moving around and changing position, but while idling, with a soggy vibration isolator mount, no wind resistance, and nothing significant to do, it gets itself into a hissy fit. Perhaps Mr Gimbal is just bored?

Anyway, you can wind down the stiffness settings, which will often cure it instantly, but then sacrifice some stability later on in the operation. In this case, it was a simple case of the top-heavy gimbal and payload struggling for reference on its flimsy little plastic tripod on a wooden bench. I kept the high-stiffness settings, and simply picked it up to cure it.

Testing

I then spent the next couple of hours walking around the woods with this monstrosity, wondering where I’d gone wrong in life. I’ve spent the last couple of decades working all over the world with gimbals worth up to $1m. Now I’m in wellies, walking through my local woodland trying to avoid trampling the bluebells as I desperately try to find something interesting to include in my YouTube video. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?

It wasn’t great, and I blamed the wellies, I blamed the weather, and I blamed the location, but it was mostly down to me TBH. I’m not a handheld gimbal guy, my gimbals are usually attached to cars, blimps, helicopters, drones, wires and boats, but I tried, and it was fun. More importantly, it works. The Sony 200-600mm lens does balance and work just fine on the DJI RS3 Pro gimbal.

Managing the weight

To like to manage my weight I use a strict method that includes copious amounts of steak and deadlifts.

To manage the weight of this rig, I used a TILTA lightweight dual-handle gimbal support system. It comes with a heavy-duty belt and choice of receptacles for the Ronin RS3, and a lighter-weight chest harness with elasticated straps that attach to the dual-handle system. These dual handles mount to the sides of the RS3 Pro perfectly.

I chose this as it’s lightweight and discreet. It slips under a zipped jacket for when you don’t want to be noticed, and it helps avoid looking like a complete goon in the street. It’s quick and easy to engage and disengage from the receptacle, and from the quick-release elasticated straps. When engaged, it reduces a lot of the weight in your arms, by sticking it very much on your hips.

It’s comfortable, and I think the handles alone are worth having. I prefer these to the DJI briefcase handle, or any ring you could put it in for most places I’ll find myself operating.

You’ll find it here - TILTA Dual Handle Gimbal Support

The DJI Ronin RS3 Pro with a Sony A7iii and Sony 200-600mm lens is giant. It easily justifies something more substantial than the TILTA, or even an overhead Easyrig type deal, I’ve seen these used for a lot less, but I like the discreet nature of the TILTA for what I do, and it supplements the deadlifts nicely.

Test Footage

I don’t want to sing and dance about this just yet. The test footage was a little… meh. Uninspiring.

Unsure if it was the dull dark woodland or the gorilla in the wellies, but it wasn’t the payload. The Sony 200-600mm in the RS3 Pro was much better than I expected it could be. It’s remarkable how far gimbals have come. We’re now at the point where you can stick this behemoth 600mm lens in a lightweight handheld gimbal and get “SuperSmooth” footage. And what’s more, you can stick a 1.5x crop on it using APS-C mode and achieve 900mm!!!

You’ll see a few shots at the end of the video that were at 900mm. The horse, the deer, and the bluebell shot at 11:17, you’ll see the one I mean, and many of the other shots were at 600mm. It’s impressive, even if my operating wasn’t.

What will be cool is to put it to the test somewhere better, a busy city centre for example. That’'ll be awesome, maybe I’ll do that next.