Our Quick And Easy Zhiyun Crane Setup Guide!

[the_ad id=”20″]In this article, we are going to be going over our quick and easy Zhiyun Crane setup guide for any of our readers who are either looking for ways to set up their gimbal or ways to speed up their initial setup time. Thankfully, Zhiyun has done a great job of refining the initial setup of their Crane range with each subsequent generation of their gimbals.

This can actually help you save a bunch of time and effort each time you have to set up or balance your gimbal. We will be going through this post as if it is the very first time that you are doing your initial set up for your gimbal when getting it out the box for the very first time.

Charge Your Gimbal

Although many of the units from the Crane gimbal range will have a residual charge when you first order it from Zhiyun due to quality testing after production, we would always recommend that you initially charge your gimbal upon delivery. Although the Crane range is pretty large now, the gimbals are split between two main charging systems.

The earlier generations have removable batteries that need to be placed into an external charging unit whereas the modern Crane gimbals have a USB charger build in and you just plug the charging cable into the gimbal and let it charge up. The charging LED will remain solid when the gimbals batteries are fully charged and you can then move on to the next stage.

Balance Your Gimbal

The next stage is to balance your gimbal, now, this is much easier to show than to type so we would recommend that you watch the video above as it is much easier to understand than us typing it out. The majority of the traditional Zhiyun Crane designs are very similar to the one shown in the video above.

If you do have the Zhiyun Crane 3 with the new design then we would recommend that you check YouTube for a dedicated video on balancing that specific model. Although it may take a while to get the hang of it, once you have got the hand of the process, you can usually totally balance your gimbal in a minute or two.

Mount Your Camera Rig

The majority of the Zhiyun gimbal range use the Manfrotto quick release plate system like many commonly used tripods. Due to this, it is really easy to quickly and easily mount your camera to your gimbal directly from a tripod that uses the Manfrotto quick release plate system. That said, if you don’t already have a quick release plate fitted to your camera then it is really easy and straight forward to do.

Once your camera is mounted to your Zhiyun Crane you are good to go and play with your new toy to capture all the video footage you need.