MonkeyCam

MonkeyCam™ is a 3 axis stabilized action camera that will smooth out your action videos on the most aggressive, abusive bone jarring terrain, and make that video look like it was shot professionally. BUT the big differences are, that MonkeyCam™ will cost a lot less than that expensive professional gear, and it fits into a 4" x 3" space, weighs in at only 11 ounces, and requires NO maintenance & has NO power source other that what is required by the camera itself. Its operation is fully automatic, fully adjustable, and it seeks out the mean axis of the direction of motion. MonkeyCam™ can be mounted in any orientation inside & outside a vehicle, on a helmet, on an animal, plane, boat, car or train. More specific uses are in MX racing, drag racing, boat racing, GP racing, ATVs, Mountain bikes, stunt cars, RC cars & trucks, Baja type racing. The applications are endless. Oh, you can also hold it in hand for stabilized video of parties, sporting events, concerts, or any situation that requires a super compact fully automatic stabilized camera system. As an off-road enthusiast I like to take videos of my experiences and the fun I have, most of us do this. Then, back at home, I edit the raw video into a movie. But, the one thing that always ate at me, was the shakiness and motion blurring of the recorded high action videos. The camera was doing exactly what it was supposed to do by recording what it was seeing, and it was seeing a lot of action, and I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could stabilize the video to make it watchable without having to take Dramamine before viewing. Here’s where my journey began. I found some free stabilizing software that did a really good job of what I wanted. But I quickly realized that the software was cropping the video severely in order to get the video stabilized. A 1080 x 1920 video was essentially reduced in size to a 900 x 1800, or even less in some cases, but frame cropping is unavoidable with software stabilization. As I continued using software stabilization, the more problems I encountered. I noticed that when the camera was subject to the harsh accelerations & jarring from a road full of ruts, rocks, whoops, jumps or whatever, that the frames in those scenes were motion blurred and severely off axis from the previous frames, this is unavoidable when recording on a rigid mounted camera, and software stabilization fails miserably here, because it cannot repair motion blur or ‘fill the gap’ between severely off axis frames. It does its best at what it’s designed to do. It was obvious that there's a severe deficiency with software stabilization for the discerning videographer. Some video stabilization software can add interpolated frames to attempt to fill the severe off axis gap of two or more frames, but this trick is obvious & unrealistically odd looking. I've tried all the stabilization software and a heap of amateur video editing platforms that have stabilization built in. I've even tried professional video editing platforms, but there isn’t anything a consumer computer can do to eliminate these aforementioned problems that plague video stabilization software. Now, some new action cameras and many consumer/professional cameras have a little trick they use to stabilize the image before it’s recorded. They have miniature servos attached to the lens that receive input from a built in solid state gyro/accelerometer. The gyro tells the servos how to move the lens in order to compensate for pitch & yaw but not for tilt. The drawbacks with this “lens wiggling” system is that there is no tilt stabilization, and it cannot compensate fast enough to stabilize the video effectively in a fast action, harsh & jarring environment. The lens wiggling technique also imparts a skewing effect to the video, kind of like what a fun-house mirror would do to a video. Gimbaled stabilization platforms have been around for a long time, and over time they have shrunk in size & cost to where most people can afford one. I’ve had the opportunity to try a few consumer/semi-pro gimbaled platforms and I was impressed with the stability & operation, that is, up to a point, and that point came quickly… “That point” divides into a few points. They are large, require a separate power source, and cannot stabilize a harsh pounding environment without giving away their signature jittery output. There are some miniature gimbaled platforms designed for the GoPro Hero camera, but they suffer the same instabilities as their larger brothers.