What are your drone hardware options.
I’m going to look at this from the point of view of the drone as an aero video or graphy platform.
You’ve got two major decisions to look at first.
You go for a wing would you go for a multi rotor so fairly easy decision to make but it’s worth having a quick look at the differences between the two multi rotor is a machine that will have multiple propellers on it to keep it up in the air wing is a machine that looks a little bit more like an aeroplane and it will have a propeller on it as well to propel it through the air.
The rebels these days is typically on the back of the machine both to prepare the propeller.
If you have flied into something but also to help protect the thing that you might be flying at inti it typically very light weights and they will be made of a rigid foam that keeps up in the air.
But this also makes them extra efficient.
Vantages the wings is that they are a much longer range.
So they’ll go further.
They’ll fly much further and they’ll fly much faster.
The disadvantages are the fact that they are typically quite large at least a metre wide often going up to two meters.
The footage that they’ll produce will typically be unstabilized.
So they rarely have a camera symbol on them.
They can do but they rarely do.
And so all the footage is going to have a lot of the flight dramatics in it where you can see people weaving around which is great for some kind of footage.
But often you want stabilized footage to the obvious disadvantage from a camera platform point of view of the wing is by its very nature.
You have to be flying forward quite fast for it to remain up in the sky.
And this means therefore that you’d get very little control over where you get position that camera you can’t stop at any point and start to have a more closer look at something that may have caught your eye as you were flying by it.
The reason that I’ve mentioned that in all of this discussion is it is possible for wings to give you some very stunning footage.
The footage will be rich in flight dramatics so giving the viewer that true experience of what it’s like to be a fly through the sky.
Which works for a percentage of your overall production that you might be wanting to put together.
Here’s an example from the guys in team blacksheep.
This is from one of their one minute videos where it’s completely unnecessary.
Co-pilot stretched out a camera popped it up no music no chopping it up just see what the person that was flying it was experiencing.
You can see it’s very dramatic.
Got a Star Wars thing going on.
But likewise you couldn’t decide to say stop at that point there and get a closer look at that tree.
But that’s obviously not the point of this kind of footage we’re trying to show something else too.
Which you can clearly see in this situation.
They’ve done very successfully.
The other thing that you can say about Wings is that they’re primarily designed for the fun of actually flying them.
Their main focus is not to be a camera platform MOTY rotors on the other hand are designed to be camera platforms they’re also designed to be flown for fun.
That and a lot of cases they’re designed exactly to hold your camera up in the air and stable position and few allow you to move it wherever you want to get the footage that you’re after.
Your multi rotor will have three or more propellors typically eight being the maximum.
The more propellors they have the more stable the l.b. the more they’ll be able to lift the better take up heavier cameras.
And also you’ve got extra built in redundancy so that if one of the propellers had an issue with it or an issue with a motor that was power in the propeller then the others would be a take over to keep it up in the sky.
There’s a downside to that in that the more propellers that you have in place the higher the prices and the less portable it comes as a sweet spot that’s been discovered around quads where they’ve got four propellers and this appears to be one of the best compromises between price and portability and a lot of the quads you’ll find in the consumer space.
But increasingly you’re finding them in the process more space and also the professional space.
The downsides of the multi rotor compared to say a wing is that they have less range and less flight time for typical wing.
You’re likely to be up in the air for up to 30 minutes sometimes even longer word for your multi rotor is more likely to be between 10 to 20 minutes.
Despite that that 10 to 20 minutes is typically enough time for you to get the footage that you’re after.
The other disadvantage of a multi rotor.
It’s got all these spinning normally unprotected props and so it could do a lot more harm if it to fall out the sky.
If something goes wrong then it does tend to fall straight at the sky whereas a wing is still a wing so it will be a glide down more slowly.
Despite all of that the multi rotor is your camera platform.
It will allow you to attach a grimbal to it which will then stabilize your camera.
This will give you beautiful still images that you have a lot of control over the sample footage that we saw from the wing show the flight dramatics.
What are your options when putting together a multi rater for a camera platform.
Well first of all I’d recommend a quad.
It’s so portable you’re likely to get a lot of use out of it as a result of purely that one feature alone.
There are a couple of other features that we should discuss.
The first is a gamble.
I highly recommend that if not immediately at some point you make sure that your quad has got a gamble on it.
This will stabilize your camera footage if the camera the judges unstabilized and lots of videos out there.
With unstabilized footage and it will appeal to a much smaller section of your potential audience namely those that are into flying.
Radio controlled aircraft around the other feature to look at is whether it has a first person view capability.
So this will be where it will have a video transmitter on the actual quad in the sky that transmits a video image back to either a screen or some goggles on the ground.
When this is in place if you’re the pilot It’s like you are looking out the front of it and there are lots of advantages to this primarily.
It’s much easier to control.
It’s more like sitting inside a car.
If you don’t have this then when you turn left and when you turn right it’s fine for when the machine is actually flying away from you.
And as soon as the machine would come back toward you and you were looking at it up in the sky suddenly those controls are flipped around.
So when you turned left and you control the quad will move right.
And that takes quite a lot of getting used to.
So I find it much safer to fly from a first person point of view in terms of the ability to control it with ease.
The other thing is is if you got that first person point of view and you were able to see much more clearly what the camera shot is that you’ll get in.
And so it’s less of kind of a chance thing where you get your camera footage back at the end of the day and hope that you just lined up your shots.
If you do fly with first person view it then it’s highly recommended that you always have a spotter with you.
Somebody else that will look up into the sky and look around your machine to see if there’s going to be any issues that might be occurring.
Is that one of the disadvantages of flying first person view and that is you can’t see all the way round your machine because it’s as if you’re mentally inside your machine looking out the front window.
The other thing you need to look for as well is whether flying with a first person point of view is actually allowed in your country.
There’s a lot of discussion of this at the moment.
In some countries.
One of the ways to fly first person is rather than the image coming back to goggles on your head comes back to a screen.
And this has a little bit of the best of both worlds because not only are you looking at the screen so you’ve got that first person perspective.
You can also look up from the screen to your quad in the sky and get a little bit of a view as to what’s going on around it.
The other thing to consider then is what kind of machine do you actually buy.
Assuming it’s going to have those features.
We’ve got two options here.
You can buy your RTX if you’re ready to fly machines.
They’re machines that come in a box you charge up the battery read the instruction manual and you get flying within minutes.
Your alternative is build your own with a Come in kit form and then you’ll get your screwdriver out.
Often you’re soldiering on as well.
And then you’ll put it together yourself.
The advantages of ready to fly are obvious in that you can get going very nicely and very quickly.
The advantages of build your own as you get to know the machine intimately as you put it all together.
This will mean that you’ve got a much better chance of looking at all of the components inside it and doing maintenance checks to make sure that it’s all working very well.
You’re going to need to end up having to do that.
You ready to fly machine Why are you constantly got to be checking these things over and that’s harder to do if you.
Not really sure how it’s been put together and how it works.
An example of a ready to fly machine would be anything from the dji Phantom range kind of prices were looking at here will go from 500 all the way up to sixteen hundred dollars to sixteen hundred dollars.
You should be having a machine with a symbol on it.
It should also have some kind of first person view capability possibly even for that price.
Going back to some goggles on your head so you can see at the front of it in an emersed kind of way.
These are the most popular drone in the world at the moment.
They’re also quite capable.
And initially they could serve most of your flying and filming needs an alternative to ready to fly is Build Your Own.
These typically come in kit form and you’ll probably be having to get your soldiering ironed out and put them together yourself.
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