THE SEVEN JIB XL

Features:

The SEVEN Jib XL weighs just over 20 lbs and is only 33" long when folded It will carry up to 60 pounds of camera, fluid head and accessories it has a built in tilt brake It has 6.5’ of lift - more than the others

Price:

The first jib to break the under $1k barrier and still the best on the market Underslung bracket is only $99 and cradles your camera from below rather than clamping to fragile handles (many film cameras have no top handle) The tilt brake is included, not an added extra Full ball levelling just like your tripod - not a flat plate that allows no adjustment. Multi-base also mounts on Mitchell topped tripods and dollies at no extra cost. The 150mm bowl and spin on base are only $199 for those of you with bigger cameras.

Performance:

There are over 200 Seven Jibs in use. They are all over the world. I’ve had early models come back from use in Peru and Africa and Egypt and Asia and on and on. They are beat - they look terrible, all scratched and dented. And they still work great. The owners just want them checked and re-lubed and tested.

SO. YOU NEED A JIB. BUT WHICH ONE?

You can buy one of those jibs from California or Austrailia but you will be paying about twice the money for a jib with less lift and carrying capacity - and these jibs are heavier.

You can buy one of the just under $k jibs that are offered in those little ads in the back of some of the trade magazines but they have no tilt brake, lift only about 4 feet, are heavier and bulkier to transport - essentially cruder, clumsier machines. They don’t fold for transport, generally, and the one that does is 52" long - not very short at all. These jibs weigh about 10 pounds more than the XL. Ugh. Grunt.

If you have less that $500 to spend then you might go with one of the prosumer jibs. These will do a good job but only with smaller video cameras - less than ten pounds including pan tilt head, and they lack ball levelling and other features. If you get a larger camera as your career grows or you need to use a remote head or teleprompter you can easily move past the capacity of these prosumer jibs. When that happens, you’ll need to sell the jib somehow - so it isn’t an investment in the future but rather a make-do piece of equipment. The Seven Jib is the one your can grow into; it is also impressive to clients - no excuses here.

SO, HOW DO YOU USE THE SEVEN JIB?

Heads

First, you need to take a look at your current fluid head and make sure that it is compatible. The Seven Jib works with Cartoni, Sachtler, Vinten, Bogen, Miller, OConnor - really, any head that has a 100mm ball base. This size - 100mm - is pretty much standard now. Older OConnor heads - even smaller units like the OConnor 50 - had larger radius, proprietary ball bases. If you have one of these, you should call me and I’ll specially cut our 100mm bowl on my lathe to fit your head. I once ran into a Cartoni that had a 110mm ball. But these are rare. Chances are your head has a 100mm ball base.

You might have a smaller head with a 75mm ball base. Order our 75mm adapter which nests in the standard 100mm bowl.

The largest ball is 150mm. These you’ll find on the Sachtler Studio series, Ronford F7 and F15s, Cartoni C40, Oconnor 100, to name a few. You have a head this size if you have a large studio type video camera or a 35mm movie camera, like an Arri 35BL or Mitchell or Moviecam Superamerica or?

If you have a 150mm head then you need our larger 150mm bowl. It bolts in place of the standard bowl and works great. If you have a set of 150mm bowl-topped sticks then you need our 150 adapter plate that screws to the base of the Seven Jib and broadens it’s reach so that it rests nicely on the top of the bowl and not down inside it where it could TIP OVER! Yikes.

Now you could have a funky cool older head with a Mitchell base - or maybe even a newer expensive geared head with a Mitchell base. In this event, call me and I’ll make it fit. But if you have a big old Arri gear head or a Technovision geared head or a Worral geared head you need to remember the 60 pound limit. These heads are likely 30-40 pounds so your camera must come in at 20 to 30 pounds to be usable. Hey, if this is you, cool. Geared heads do stuff that fluid heads can’t, like stop on a dime for perfect framing at the end of a whip pan. Just count the turns on the wheel - one, two and a half - and you are right where you want to be. Most of us like the easy learning and lower cost of the fluid head, I think.

Bogen Heads

Bogen sells heads in a strange way, like no other company. They sell the heads with a flat bottom. There is a 3/8-16 female tapped hole in the bottom of all the Bogen fluid heads. When you buy legs from Bogen, you simply screw the head down onto the legs and then you have to tighten three set screws to finish. If you buy a still photo type Bogen tripod, then you have no ball base, and your head is kind of permanently attached to your legs. Not great if you want to remove it for jib or dolly or hi-hat or car mount use. If you buy a film/video tripod from Bogen - specifically the 3190 series - then you get a ball base. This ball base is sold with the triopd legs, not the head! Nobody else does it this way.

Actually, if you buy one of the top of the line Bogen fluid heads - the 316 or 510 - you do get a ball base with the head. So buy a set of legs and a 510 head and you get an extra ball. This you could use to make a really low hi-hat - that is, you could use the levelling capability of the ball base in your hi hat without your head! Just screw the extra ball base directly into your camera bottom, which should also have a 3/8-16 thread (although if it is a small prosumer video camera it won’t fit as the hole will be 1/4-20). Now you have levelling without the height of the head so you can go really low.

This works great for car hood shots back into the windshield, by the way. At any rate, your ball from bogen will be 100mm as that is all they sell - no 150mm, and no 75mm except for their 3181 series tripod, which is too light for use with the Seven Jib.

If you have a bogen head - say the older 3066 or small 3063 - but no ball base you can order one from Bogen. I can’t see it listed in the catalog, but you can tell them you want the ball base that you see at the top of their 3190 sticks. Don’t let them sell you the #3114 100mm bowl interface as this is exactly the opposite of what you need.

Now if you do get a ball base from Bogen because your head has a flat bottom, that probably means your tripod has no bowl for the ball. So you have no ball levelling. Get into the eighties! Yep, that’s when ball levelling became standard, like 1982. So you should probably buy a new set of legs, but keep your head if you like it.

By the way, my personal suggestion for a really great yet inexpensive fluid head is the Bogen 510-10 head or the Bogen 316. Great deals for about $750 and $550 respectively.

But if cost is no object, my overall favorite is the Cartoni C20s, I might like the new Oconnor stuff if I had a chance to try them (though the controls are in weird places but maybe they are in better places than I’m used to ) and the Sachtler Video 18/20 stuff is superb as are the Studio series. Miller is right up there too - might be the real bargain. I know guys with Vinten that love them - I haven’t tried ‘em.

This brings us to sticks.

Tripod Legs and the SEVEN Jib XL

The Seven Jib XL is designed to work on the sticks - tripod legs - you already have. You don’t need to buy a special set if your sticks have the 100mm bowl at the top, or if you have a tripod or dolly with a Mitchell top as the Multi-base of the Seven Jib has two steps and will automatically fit either. And, if you have 150mm sticks just order the 150 adapter plate that screws to the Multi-base of the jib.

But - will your legs take the weight? If you have a Betacam or an Aaton or Arri 16SR or one of the new Dvcams then you will likely have well over 100 pounds on you sticks. The camera and head will be about 20 pounds (maybe 25 or 30 if you have accessories like a monitor or matte box or follow focus, batteries, etc.)and the jib is another 20 and then you’ll need about 60 to 75 pounds of counterweight. So, you now have 100 pounds on the top of your sticks. If you have a 150mm head and an Arri 3 or 435 or maybe a 35BL1 like me then you might have 175 pounds on your sticks. So, you have to determine if your legs can take it.

Virtually all 150mm bowl legs, being large and beefy, have no problem. Ditto for Mitchell topped sticks which were usually designed to take big Mitchell BNCs or Panavisions, etc. The Ronford legs are legendary for strength and toughness. Some 100mm sticks are kind of faint at heart, especially the two stage, carbon fiber jobs that are great for mountain climbing but not so great for supporting jibs.

Here’s a good test - take your head off your sticks and sit on your legs. This will give you an idea of how the legs are doing, and if one of the leg locks starts to slide you can hop off before any damage is done.

How’d it go? Did it feel nice and solid or like your grandma’s rickety old dining room chairs? If it felt loose, if your leg locks aren’t strong or you have a two stage set of sticks with 6 leg locks total and things are kind of iffy with your behind up there, then you might want to get a strong or set of legs, try our seven sticks..

Now, a word about weight. One hundred pounds up on your sticks sounds like a lot, but this isn’t bad, as the weight is perfectly balanced on top of the sticks - the center of the swing axis of the jib, and where all the weight is, is right in the very center of the sticks, if the top of your tripod is close to level. Nothing on the tripod wants to tip the rig over, like when you have your camera tilted forward on the fluid head without the jib, because everything is balanced with the jib.

So, this is the first thing to do:

Level Your Sticks

Get a cheap shorty carpenter’s level from Home Depot or Loews or wherever and decide where you want to set up the jib. Spread out the sticks, remove the head, then eyeball the top of the tripod. Adjust the legs until the top is pretty close to level, then check with the carpenter’s level. It doesn’t have to be dead on, remember, because you can fine level the head at the end of the Seven Jib. Watch out! Other jibs don’t have ball levelling - they expect you to get your sticks perfectly level. The head just sits flat on their cheap end plates. The Seven Jib has a cast/machined T356 aircraft aluminum bowl on the end that lets you level your head just like on your sticks.

Now, why don’t build a level into the jib? Because it’s much easier to level the top of your sticks before you put the jib on them. So you need a separate level. I could sell you one for $10 but you would then go to Home Depot some time and see it for $7.50 and get mad at me. So, just buy one yourself. Then you can get a lot of other junk you need, like some DeWalt batteries (see our DeWalt adapter page) and A.C. cords, and an alumimun extention pole for your shotgun mic and some moving blankets and . . .

So now your sticks are pretty much level. Unfold and mount the jib. You can see my friend Dee Dee do this on our demo video. Call, I’ll send it free. Set up instructions come with the jib.

One tip - use a chair or apple box or stool to rest the business end of the jib on when you set it up. You can put the bowl end on the floor but then you have to bend over to mount the head and camera and level the head and it’s harder when you have to bend over.

Put a 20 or 25 pound barbell weight on the weight bar, and tighten the nuts to it. This will pre-load the jib and keep the hinged main bar rigid while you mount the head and camera. Make sure that the pan and tilt locks on the head are tightened. Then add more weights until you have the rig balanced.

The Seven Jib uses standard barbell weights - not the Olympic kind with the larger hole, but the standard kind with the 1" hole that you can find at sporting goods stores for about 35 cents a pound. Get three 25 pounders for the average pro sized video or 16mm camera. You don’t need any smaller ones because you can fine balance by slowing rotating the whole wieght stack on the main bar. It has an Acme thread and by turning the weights like you would a steering wheel you can perfectly fine balance the rig.

Now you can shoot. But first, you can re-level your tripod head if necesarry. Sometimes you need to make the head un-level to make the shot look right, usually because of lens distortion. Or maybe you want things to look funky.

A few tips: the Seven Jib is smooth as silk. The new radial needle bearing in the base and sintered bronze tilt bearings assure this. You’ll float your camera around with the sligtest touch. Set your couterbalance on your fluid head as you normally would, then set your tilt and pan drags very light. If you set them heavy you will move the whole jib when you try to pan or tilt instead of just the head. I like a 2 setting on a 7 plus 7 type head, usually.

SHOOTING IDEAS

After spending a few years with the Seven Jib, I have come up with a few shots that really pay off. One is to set the jib to fly over or past something - I adjust the jib so that the camera lens just about hits the subject, but not quite. Then I push the jib past it, back and forth, untill I get the lighting right and the focus pull figured out. I lock the tilt so that it stays where I put it. Then I hit record or the run button and push the jib past. It goes right where it did the last time, in practise. This works great with the macro setting on film and video cameras.