I'm currently designing a linear camera slider, that will be used to hold camera equipment weighing just about 15 Kgs including all of the lenses and monitors and everything else.
For those who don't know what a camera slider is, it's a linear slider on top of which a camera is mounted and then the camera is slided slowly to create some nice footage like this.
The problem
Now, looking at the commercially available camera sliders out there, there seems to be two ways in which the motor maybe mounted on these sliders:
Motor mounted on the side:
Motor mounted directly on the carriage:
I would like to know which option would be optimal - Performance-wise (this slider maybe used vertically too, to create bottom to top slide shots), efficiency-wise and which one of these two will be resistant to motor vibration (these motors vibrate a lot, the effects of which may sometimes leak into the produced footage).
Additional Questions
Motor mounted on the carriage directly maybe, just maybe more efficient, but it also has to carry it's own weight in addition to the 15kg camera load?
Pulling force is greater than pushing force (I have no idea why, would be great if someone explained why, atleast in this case?), so a motor mounted in the end should be able to lift vertically with ease?
Does a belt setup as shown in the first figure above really dampen the motor vibrations? Will/won't the motor vibrating on the end get amplified (because, the whole setup will be attached to a single tripod in the exact center of the slider)
Which design will be less stressful for the motor, taking inertia into consideration for both cases?
Which one of these designs will be best suitable for vertical pulling of load against gravity?
Manufacturers use both designs interchangeably, so it's hard to predict which design is better than which.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Please note, this question has been migrated from the Stackexchange Physics (and Electrical) forum by me because the mods thought it would be appropriate here.