I'm an avid collector of old kit, and thought I'd share a picture of one of my favourite bits of kit, bought second hand, when a studio closed.
A Vinten Dolphin arm, complete with lead weights in a flightcase, on a Vinten heavy duty tripod and skid. It takes two to lift in and out of the van, but it travels upright on it's wheels. The best bit is that because it's so massive, you can use it just like a conventional tripod. Locked off, it's as solid as anything else I have, but can be boomed and swung at will.
My new shooting style is to still use SD cameras but sit a small Panasonic with wide angle on it, on the handle so I have plenty of options in the edit as a wide angle is always available, and as it needs to be shrunk to SD frame size, there are plenty of possibilities to fill the frame with a selected section. Works rather nicely. Anybody else doing this?
Wow, that's a real beauty Paul! I have a cheapish USA crane that works okish, but won't be as stable as that. Just wish you were a bit closer so I could borrow it. :)
I've used a Dolphin with a Bosch KCH1000 HD camera, 33kg camera, 30kg lens. Worked like a dream, lovely piece of kit.
The best thing with Vinten equipment is that age really doesn't matter as long as they've been looked after. If anyone wishes to borrow it - and can collect and return it, they're more than welcome to. Lowestoft isn't on the way to anywhere, it's just east!
Now that's a MAN's jib and if I have any need for one in the future I will be down to you pretty rapid. :D
Yeah, great kit. we used them several times, the last was on a HD shoot at Nyman's Gardens, on rails with the later (and much better, but hardly lighter) camera, LDK9000.
It's interesting that the Dolphin Arm is now seen as 'heavyweight kit'. In the 1970s and 1980s, when 'main studio' television cameras were attached to their CCU by a 101-core cable 1" thick and needed four people to lift them on to a dolly, the Dolphin Arm was something booked out of Stores for lightweight camera shoots in the Blue Peter Garden. I haven't visited TC for probably ten years now and I would imagine that the real 'heavyweights' - the Mole Cranes, the Herons and the Nikes have all been consigned to the TV equivalent of Barry scrapyard.
For anyone scanning second-hand lists for old studio dollies that might be suitable for today's cameras then it's worth investigating the Portaped and the Teal. Who knows, you might even come across the mysterious VLAD - in reality an acronym for the Very Low Angle Dolly, which need a tracker pushing a pram-handle to propel the camera and its operator across the floor!
Ray