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Anyone with a smartphone can shoot their own home video. As the quality of the camera on the humble smartphone keeps getting better, the difference between the camera on your phone and a professional level camera gets smaller and smaller. However, if you are serious about shooting a high quality movie, you do need the help of some additional tools like the Freefly Movi. This nifty gadget is touted as a cinema robotic stabilizer or gimbal for your smartphone. What it does is to help you get rid of the shakes and bumps and lets you shoot buttery smooth video footage.

One big difference between home videos and movie footage is how smooth everything seems to be in a movie. While fast moving shots on a home video is all jittery and vomit inducing, movie shots are always smooth no matter how frantic the action gets. The secret behind this is a piece of equipment known as the camera stabilizer that isolates the movement of the camera operator from the camera.

Through the wonders of technology, the huge, heavy and very expensive camera stabilizer has now been shrunken into a handheld portable device. The Freefly Movi is not the first camera stabilizer for the smartphone. However, its design is rather unique and it has quite a few features that certainly makes it one of the best stabilizers for your phone.

The Freefly Movi is the company’s attempt at making a consumer level gimbal for ordinary users like you and me. They have been making professional level stabilizers for a long time but they cost in the region of $15,000 and above.

Design wise, the Freefly Movi looks a lot like a piece of gaming equipment especially with the joystick-like handle with control buttons. The construction feels really solid and we liked the fact that you can set the gimbal down without the need for a tripod. Mounting your phone on the spring-loaded clamp is also real easy. It is a 3-axis stabilizer which means that you can twist and turn Movi any way and it will keep the camera absolutely stable.

Up till this point, the Freefly Movi works and function just like any other 3-axis phone gimbal out there. What earns it the robotic stabilizer moniker is the Movi app. With it, you can create all kinds of cool shots like Movilapse (or moving timelapse), barrel rolls and orbit shots around a subject.

Using Bluetooth, you can further control the camera app on your phone using the physical buttons on the handle. You can start and stop recording, adjust exposure and even switch between the front and rear cameras. The app and the extra controls you have puts the Freefly Movi a class above the other phone gimbals that don’t do much beyond giving you a steady shot.

While it is much more affordable compared to its high-end siblings, the Freefly Movi is still aimed at the higher-end user. It is priced at more than double compared to other gimbals including the highly popular DJI models. The other shortcoming is the fact that it currently only supports iOS but Android support is in development.
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