I've dealt with this problem by placing several layers of padded material on the floor beneath the tripod feet. You could use folded blankets, foam blocks, or some other type of padding. For an added layer of insulation, cut a hole in a tennis ball, and insert the tripod foot into the tennis ball. Just be careful, because all this makes the tripod less stable. Camera movement may not be as smooth as without the padding.

HTH,
Paddy
SCS

This won't help with camera vibration, but audio can be improved by using the low-cut filter on the camera. It wastes a lot of recording headroom to record useless low frequency rumble.

I've only experienced something similar once when shooting a concert with a camera that still had tubes in it. When I got too close to the main speakers, not only could I not hear anything (yes, I was wearing ear plugs), the image from the camera vibrated in time to the music.
A long way of saying that, based on what you've told us, my biggest concern is the sound pressure level in the room. A lot of DJs have absolutely no clue (nor do they care) about things like this and it will take a warning from the appropriate government agency to get them to lower the volume to an acceptable level.

Mike

Thanks for all the suggestions .
Sound is recorded just fine , camera does excellent job here

It is really those very deep base sounds , very popular in timberlake-alike hiphop stuff , where the recorded video blurs on the rythm of these bases in the music.
As is the camera is trying to adjust automatically focus on the rythm of the base .
And indeed , one can compare such shows with a concert sound level . When the ladies dance hot stuff , the audio people get overheated and jump up the level :-)

When putting camera on shoulderholder , it is gone , so must come through the floor , I think .

Thought the ( very ) expensive Libec T98C with ( even more ) expensive head would get rid of it but seems to be 2.800 euro waiste of money. ( tripod has some really decent rubber pads )

Will certainly at first try with de-activating image stabilisation and get some rubber stuff with me to try-out . Tripod must be stable since am non-stop zooming and following with the camera.

Any more suggestions still welcome .

We spent an entire day shooting in front of some serious subs that feed an outdoor stadium. No problems at all for the cameras.
Subs etc were on plinths, put anything on the plinths e.g. bottle of drink and you'd get an interesting example of harmonic motion in fluids.

It's pretty unlikely sound is going to shake a tripod + camera. What is very likely is what they are resting on will be excited by the sound waves. During our day in the mosh pit the cameras were on the ground, it takes a lot to make the earth move.
I regularly do have issues with sprung floors, doesn't take much to get them going and the small movement of the floor is amplified by the tripod. Solution that has worked best for me is three sand bags, one under each foot of the tripod.
That does two things, dampens the floor and isolates the movement of the floor.

Tip: Sandbags are oftenly yellow, shot bags are black. For this application they are not the same.

The tennis ball idea sounds good however using an elastic medium to isolate vibration brings with it a risk of making matters worse. Now if you bump the tripod it is likely to wobble around all by itself. It's still worth a try. I'd also add an elastic cord from under the bowl of the tripod (most have a hook for this) to a sand / shot bag resting on the floor to put the whole system under tension.

Bob.

Yes sub-bass can also cause a lot of havoc in Audio & Video recording when standard Hard Drives are used - the sub can cause the heads on the drive to crash into the platter causing terminal failure. The vibrations are airborne therefore difficult to dampen. SSDs are immune to this phenomenon - SSL make an Audio recorder aimed at this market http://www.solid-state-logic.com/music/live-recorder/

In my experience a tripod on any non-concrete floor can have issues, though I've never seen it with a video camera, just a microphone stand. I've added to my kit a small cardboard box filled with four little foam chunks that are thick enough to hold the tripod feet off the floor with about an inch of squish. Greatly reduced conduction.

I guess it could happen with video, too, though maybe some internal components of the camera are resonating instead.

Astronomers often use these ...
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/233741-REG/Meade_07368_Vibration_Isolation_Pads.html
to reduce vibration while observing. Not sure how well they would work in your situation.

From the Meade website: "Set of three pads, constructed with multiple materials engineered for maximum vibration damping and speed. Place one pad under each tripod leg and immediately enjoy a reduction in vibrations visible in the eyepiece, improving telescope performance for your most demanding applications."

I've followed up on those some time ago, we shared a building with a business that sold them.
Based on my proding with my fingers I thought they're probably not going to work too well for a video camera, it's not heavy enough and the vibrations we're talking about here are at a lower frequency.

Bob.

If you're not in a place where you can get nice production quality sandbags you might still go to a hardware store and get 3 bags of dry sand for use in making concrete. Wrap them in plastic bags to control their leaking and then set your tripod legs on top of them.

This is reminding me of something. It used to be that if you played a mouth harp while staring an LCD display (like the numbers on a microwave oven) that the numbers would seem to jump up and down when you twanged the harp.

Rob

The problem is to isolate the camera from low frequency vibrations of the floor. The engineering fix is decouple the mass of the camera from the vibration source. So add weights to the camera and tripod (sand/shot bags) and put the feet on soft flexible mounts. The trick is to make sure that the resonant frequency of the sprung mass doesn't fall near the troublesome frequency of the bass. This means keeping its resonant frequency low. If you do this every year you might build a sprung dolly where your body adds to the sprung mass.
Many of the suggestions above touch on all these aspects.

While I agree that fixing this problem while shooting is the best solution to your problem, post processing with the Mercalli V2 stabilization plug-in can sometimes work wonders for situations like this. I've found that rock-steady stabilization can be improved when shooting at higher shutter speeds and 60p - neither of these options may be available to you. If you can put a few seconds of the offending footage in a downloadable place, I can run it thru Mercalli and see if the result is acceptable.

...Jerry

Vibration is a very different set of problems to handheld. I doubt you could move your hand at 40Hz :)

The fast shutter speed will sure help but the readout time of the CMOS sensors is the killer. The other issue is most of these problems happen when shooting indoors, a fast shutter speed isn't really an option :(

All of that said if you've got light to spare and you can find a camera with CCD sensors e.g. Z1, then you might be in luck. We still keep a couple of Z1s, in part for their CCD sensors.

Bob.

Bob,

I can't argue with anything you've said, but there's nothing like a test. If we can get some test footage, we'll see how well Mercalli works.

...Jerry

"If we can get some test footage, we'll see how well Mercalli works. "

Put camera on 1" to 2" of foam, point it at something distant, give camera a few good raps on the top. That'll give you something to work with.

I'd offer up something myself but it'll be a couple of days before I have my camera in my hands.


Bob.

Her 'ya go.

"Put camera on 1" to 2" of foam, point it at something distant, give camera a few good raps on the top"Aaahhh... an opportunity to break out our old friend the Hula Dancer (remember her?). The following was shot with my GH2 @ 720 60p 1/125 sec (CMOS sensor). I left the sound in, so you can detect the moment I rapped the camera. btw: for those not familiar with stabilization in post, the zoom in the stabilized clip is 'cuz that's the way stabilization works (there are some not-so-good ways to avoid this.)

So, imho the result is not perfect, but certainly a big improvement. This was shot with my camera @ 720 60p. I'd still like to run a test with the OP footage as the results may be different.



...Jerry

Stabilization software won't work with intra frame shake. 1/30 th of a second is a lot of time especially with low frequency audio.

Paul Masters

Thanks again for all experiences and advices .

The stabilisation software is not required since it is steady .

There is no moving of the video shot , the video blurs ( picture unsharps ) on the rythm of the base.

That's better than I thought it would be however 1/125th shutter speed and low light would then pose other issues shooting in low light.

Perhaps even more of an issue is the "shake" is in time with the music, possibly several times per second. Any residual artifacts are still going to be a problem.

Thinking about this, one might well do better with the camera hand held, that'd probably get rid of the vibration and the wobble cam could be dealt with easy enough. Mind you, I have no intention of hand holding a camera for hours :)

Bob.

Thanks again for all the feedback and advice .

In meanwhile did shoot the shows again and this time no unsharpening on the ritme of the loud base .

Turning OFF camera stabilizer did the main job but to be extra sure , 3 handmade 3kg each sandbags ( double plastic packed and putten in nice black curtain material handmade bags with straps ( my wife's contribution )) strapped around the bottom of each libec leg , made things go smooth .
The sand acts as dampner for possible vibration through the legs and adds some good weight so the entire thing , which can never harm.
The bags are easy ( with straps ) to move-remove so that is also an advantage .
Need to patent this :-)

One more thing that might help. It is probably one particular resonant frequency in the floor that is vibrating the camera, and the floor is probably vibrating with certain points that are nodes and others that are in the middle of the vibration. Add to that that the floor is likely braced in places with some more rigid than others. You could likely find a place to shoot where you are either at a node or the floor bracing is better and the vibration problem will be a whole lot less.

Subwoofers should be right in corners in order to minimize uneven bass response throughout a room, but they seldom are. Walk around the room while the bass is pounding and I'll bet you'll find several places where the bass frequencies are bouncing in such a way that they cancel themselves out. One of them might be a good shooting location.