Not content with just reviewing a GoPro, we wanted to go the next step further, and review something that’s absolutely insanely fun. Action cameras are great and all, but you have to attach them to something — a car, a motorbike, your head, your dog .. generally something that can’t really get too far away from you. Sure, you could give it to someone else, but there’s things you can’t do with just a camera. Sometimes you want to be a hundred metres in the air, or fly over a marina.
For that, you need a drone. In the consumer drone market, there’s a couple of names, such as Parrot and DJI, and today we’ve taken a DJI Phantom 3 Advanced for a spin. We’ll go into more detail later, but in short this beast can fly for twenty five minutes or so, has a 1080p HD video camera on board, stabilised by a 3-axis gimbal. In English, this means that you have a camera which might as well be a boom-mounted camera, for all the stability it has, and you can fly it up to 2 kilometres away from the controller. It’s pretty exceptional.
The Phantom 3 doesn’t require an awful lot of time to learn how to fly, either, though it’s clear I’ve still got a bit of learning to do. Beautiful panning shots, action shots zooming up behind a jetski… the sky truly is, pardon the pun, the limit. To show off what you can do with a beautiful piece of kit like this, a few minutes in iMovie and scouring the web for a decent backing track, here’s a demo I put up on YouTube:
Please note, by default the video will play at 480p, though you can (and should) ramp it right up to 1080p to fully experience the video quality. I want to also publicly thank dousk (aka Ioannis Ntouskos) for his track Anagram which I’ve used as the backing audio for the clip.
We’ll be writing more fully about the Phantom 3 in due course, but we wanted to share this with you to enjoy on the weekend.
Video looks great, especially after a minimal time spent learning the ropes. These drones are going to revolutionise amateur/student/low budget film making. Really nice backing track too.
Only plays in 360p. There are no higher quality options.
I love the FPV, or I should it looks awesome never tried lol
had a phantom and sold it as they are boring to fly after a while
built a QAV 250 instead check out youtube for videos of them in action 🙂