The 8 Best Camera Arms
Special Honors
Motocrane Ultra If you're interested in a mount that's so big a mid-sized sedan is the bare minimum you'll need to support it, than this one's for you. It attaches to the roofs of cars, trucks, dune buggies, and pretty much anything else with four wheels and a roof, and is operated remotely by an included controller. It's absurdly expensive, but you may just find it's the one piece of gear your indie production house is missing. motocrane.com
Editor's Notes
August 23, 2019:
This continues to be a pretty variegated category, as camera arms can refer to everything from complicated jib mechanisms designed for use on film sets to articulating extensions meant to adhere to trees and hang hunting cameras for spotting game. One of each type has been suffering from some availability issues — the jib by Fotodiox and the tree unit by Allen. We found a suitable replacement for the jib as well as an offering from Sirui that operated on the same system of angles you might see on a tripod crane, but that's best suited for locked off photography rather than video in motion. We also thought this list deserved a bit of an indulgence, to pay homage to the truly impressive feats of engineering that inspire the likes of the jibs on our list, so we added the Motocrane to our special honors section. For what it is, it's actually surprisingly inexpensive, but it still costs enough that only indie production studios and rental houses have any business owning it.