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twehr wrote:It would be interesting to build a plate that has a spring-loaded 3rd roller. Then teach the rail extruder to produce custom curved rails. You could then custom design any (reasonable) camera movement you want. Add in moving the custom rail vertically on a couple of Z axis rails. At the prices Bart has been estimating for product, it would not be unreasonable to design a custom setup just for a single shot, if that shot would make the movie what it needs to be.

For a second, I didn't get what you meant by spring-loaded 3rd roller, but I get it now, I actually was thinking the same thing, but I think getting the correct tension for a curve might be difficult (spring tension too loose, the plate would fall off, too tight, might be hard to slide the plate. Technically, if the curve arc never changed, you wouldn't need a spring loaded bearing, you could just set the nut in some sort of slot and tighten accordingly. It'd be cool if you could do a full circle and aim the camera high toward to the center (so that the track wouldn't be visible) and does perfect circle shots around a person or make a cool product shot/video. I just googled "curved" aluminum extrusions" and this popped up http://misumiusa.com/PDFViewer.aspx?Metric=true2009&Page=2223

So it does look like it is possible for curved extrusions, but is there an actual market for curved extrusions for the makerslide to be adapted to?

The constant radius has limited use - what radius would you want to repeat day after day?

However... IF you went large enough with the constant radius and added another axis that is always perpendicular to the arch (effectively moving the camera in and out with regard to the point of rotation), then you could program some nice movement around the central object.

Even on a small scale, you could use this idea for interesting shots of really small objects (bugs, plantlife, etc).

You've probably seen this, but here's a similar project. It certainly looks like the MakerSlide will be a perfect solution and really reduce costs. Open Motion Control dolly.

ecurtz wrote:You've probably seen this, but here's a similar project. It certainly looks like the MakerSlide will be a perfect solution and really reduce costs. Open Motion Control dolly.

Wow, that's pretty cool! Thanks for the link!