Here's my new downshooting rig! It's always been a serious pain to set up a tripod on the workbench to shoot, because it takes up all the room on the workbench! I saw this instructable, and here's my version of it. The clever bit is using the two linked pipe clamps to make the 90 degree connector for the boom.
I followed the instructable pretty closely. I used 1 inch dowels for sturdiness, and didn't bother embedding the tripod mount, since I've got an iphone tripod mount already. Instead of using wire to attach the camera holder, I just cut the dowel and used glue. I liked how the instructions for aligning the iphone brackets use the iphone itself, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag, which doesn't stick to the epoxy.
Here's a shot showing how I cut and glued the camera bracket. I used PU glue (white gorilla glue) which was quick and filled up the gap from my crooked cut.
If the shaking is too bad, I'm going to mount the leftover bit of dowel as shown here (using two more pipe clamps) and brace the rig against the wall. Hopefully that won't be necessary.
Here's a still shot. The still camera has a wider viewing angle than the video.
Note: the camera was in portait mode, so I had to rotate this and the following pictures. Be sure and put the camera in landscape mode if that's how you want to shoot.
Here's a shot where I was bumping the table. It seems it may not be as much of a problem as I had feared.
Here's a shot while the rig is vibrating up and down. Even with this, there's only a little distortion.
And a shot while the arm is oscillating side to side. I gave the rig a pretty strong tug, far more than would ever be caused by a simple bump. Watch this in the video, it's pretty alarming!
Overall, it looks like it might work pretty well, at least based on this first impression. Here's a video showing the rig and taking some test videos.
