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?

[noname219]

Those are pretty good shots if you ask me. I don't really know if San Francisco is a really windy city but it all seems very stable in your videos. Your setup with that 7" screen is way better than I've had at my place. I've done very few aerial shots so far, only for practice (classic DJI Phantom + GoPro combination) but the Gimbal wasn't working properly so I didn't kept the footage.
I'm planning to get a 1-week formation next year and hopefully will be able to do a lot more than what I can do at the moment.

Also, did you get a permission from the port authority to fly above the ship ?

edit :

Shot one of my coworker did but we were told to not get any closer than this. Shame, really.

[darkshark]

It was incredibly windy on the day the Coit Tower video was shot (probably a steady 20mph), but the gimbal really does do a fantastic job of keeping the camera stable through turbulence. There aren't any laws regarding flying around ships here, and hopefully never will be!

What was wrong with your gimbal? I wanted to get the original Phantom when it came out until I started reading about all the random flyaways. That would make me never want to fly it ever. When the Phantom 2 came out and addressed the flyaway issue I was pretty much sold.

[noname219]

I was taking off from a grass field. The gimball touched grass and went loose a few seconds after the calibration process. It wasn't until after that I realized I should have started flying from a solid surface. I still feel kind of dumb after this. ^^

But yeah, at high altitudes and when it's windy, quads perform surprisingly well.