Aerial drone videography

[darkshark]

Hey guys.

So ever since I got my first quality DSLR camera, I've wanted to somehow get it into the air. I've bought multiple RC helicopters and attached GoPros to them but it never gets the results I'm looking for. The helicopters I have always gave terrible, shaky footage that was completely unusable. Plus they were hard to fly and ended up crashing all the time. I recently bought a drone quadcopter and jesus christ it's amazing. Extremely stable even in pretty high winds.

It's the DJI Phantom 2, with 3 axis stabilization camera gimbal, and GoPro Hero 3+ Black.



Also attached to the drone is a 5.8ghz long range video transmitter, and a telemetry recorder. On the controller I have a 7" screen with twin analog panel receiver antennas for a live view of everything while flying. Range is a little over 3 miles.

I've just been flying it outside the general area near my apartment, but the other day I took it out to San Francisco for the first time and got some really decent shots with it.

There is a big gray area regarding drones right now, especially for commercial use. From what I've gathered I should be able to host the video on stock footage sites such as iStockPhoto and ShutterStock to make some money from these since you basically give them the video for free and they sell the licensing of it for profit, not the video itself. So that's kind of the plan for now. Thoughts? Anyone here have one/mess around with RC videography?