I’ve been dabbling in the aerial video field for a while now. I have some friends who build multirotors so adding a gimbal and a GoPro isn’t too difficult. Personally I’m not skilled enough to fly and think about shots yet, but I’ve been practising on a Blade Nano QX which is a great, inexpensive learning quad.
But despite my lack of piloting skill I still wanted experience with some real-world video so I organised a shoot with a pilot. Check out the video, make sure you watch at 50fps!
Obviously the first concern with shooting at a school is safety. We were shooting on a weekend and there was almost nobody around, plus we had a member of staff with us at all times.
The first shots are out over the school wetland facilities. This is where we tested and calibrated all the gear before flying near any buildings. The GoPro 3+ was on a two-axis gimbal mounted to a custom built quad. With the payload flight time was about eight minutes, but luckily batteries are inexpensive. Unfortunately flying anything but a little action camera is prohibitively expensive when I’m not getting paid but hopefully I get a chance to work with something bigger on a real shoot.
I was viewing a live feed from the GoPro on my monitor so I could instruct the pilot in real-time. This is critical, as reviewing the footage is a tedious process of landing the quad, turning it off, removing the GoPro, removing the SD card, inserting the SD card, watching the footage. Much easier to follow it live.
The video is just a rough cut to show off the technical side of the shoot. The footage required a lot of work in post. As we only had a two-axis gimbal the yaw axis had some noticable shake, and at time there was some serious jello. Stabilising the footage was good at removing the shake, and the shots chosen had minimal jello. Then there was the problem of the optically distorted lens. I used an optics compensation preset inside of Premiere CC and with a bit of tweaking I managed to get a result I was happy with. But this did two things: the timeline was so slow it was unsusable, and the detail in the footage had turned to mush. Hopefully the GoPro 4 will come out of stabilising and optics compensation with a lot more detail. Or, GoPro could release a camera without distortion. There are GoPro competitors much better in this regard but you would need to manufacture a custom gimbal mount, which is a lot of effort.
The song in the video is ‘Mighty Glad to Fly’ by YouTube user travisgrindal. It was the first result that came up when I searched ‘quadcopter song’. Come to think of it, it may have been the only result. Also, when the video is converted to 25p, either by Premiere or YouTube, it introduces an incredible level of jello not present in the original footage. Not sure why this occurs but I hope I can fix it because most projects require delivering in 24/25p.
So, my first quadcopter video. But not my last.