Should You Use A Gimbal For Promo Footage Of Restaurant Food?

[the_ad id=”20″]The restaurant business is traditionally one of the most competitive, cutthroat, high-risk businesses going and with the surge in popularity for social media, there has been a massive uptick in restaurants looking to hire professional videographers to capture promotional footage of their food. They then upload these videos to their social media pages that sometimes have hundreds of thousands of followers to showcase their products.

As some of these restaurant chains have massive marketing budgets to help keep people coming through the door, the competition for their videography gigs is also very high and lucrative so you will need to use every advantage that you can to try and stand out. We recently saw a post on Reddit where people were talking about how they go about restaurant videography and we were shocked to see so many people saying that they are still using simple handheld rigs!

Now, when it comes to Reddit, its hard to know if the people posting the comments are telling the truth and if they are, what the exact gig they were working on was. For example, the budget from a local restaurant to an international chain is drastically different but with the low prices of gimbal stabilizers these days we don’t think that this should even be a factor. In our opinion, unless your client specifically requests you capture their footage handheld, you should always be using a gimbal to stabilize your camera rig.

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What Gimbal Should You Be Using For Food Videography

Well this totally depends on what you are using to capture your video footage and the level of videographer you are. For example, as a minimum, we would expect a videographer doing any type of paid videography work to be using some sort of mirrorless camera set up. If this is the case then we would recommend something like the Zhiyun Crane Plus (Click here to check for product prices and availability). At the time of writing, it is probably the best gimbal on the market for mirrorless cameras and it retails for a very fair price for what you are actually getting from the gimbal.

If you are more established and have a higher budget available for your gear and are using a DSLR camera rig, we would recommend that you look at picking up either the DJI Ronin S (Click here to check for product prices and availability) or the Zhiyun Crane 3 (Click here to check for product prices and availability) depending on the total weight of your camera rig. This will provide you with some excellent image stabilization while you capture the footage of your client’s food.

If you are just starting out and don’t have much of a budget available and are only planning on doing work for small local restaurants then a point and shoot camera set up may work but we would recommend that you try to upgrade to a mirrorless camera set up as soon as possible. Anyway, if you are using a point and shoot camera for your food videography then we would recommend that you take a look at the Zhiyun Crane M2 (Click here to check for product prices and availability). It is the most modern Zhiyun gimbal on the market at the time of writing and will serve your small, lightweight point and shoot rig very well without breaking the bank.

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What Difference Does It Make

We would like to think that anyone reading this, especially if they are already doing paid work as a videographer would already know the difference that using a gimbal is able to make over recording your footage freehand. That said, one the off chance we have some restaurant owners or managers reading this who are trying to work out if it is worth the additional money for the videographer who uses a gimbal rig over the videographer using a handheld rig, the answer, in our opinion at least is that it makes a world of difference.

The footage of your food will be smooth and flow much better when recorded with the camera mounted on a gimbal rather than a free hand rig. We know that some people use tripods for their image stabilization but realistically, all the videographer is able to do with a tripod is tilt up and down and pan a little bit left to right.

If the videographer has a gimbal rig, they are able to walk around your food to capture it in all of its beauty and make the people who see the footage on social media see exactly what you have to offer. As the footage capture with the gimbal shows so much more, we feel it is also safe to assume that your footage will stand out in the increasingly more competitive social media ad space.

Wrapping It Up

On the offchance it is somehow still up for debate, in our opinion, any videographer who is doing any kind of paid work should have a gimbal stabilizer as a part of their core kit. The image quality that it provides is outstanding and there is no way that a handheld rig will be able to compete with the smooth video footage you get from mounting your camera on a gimbal.