UAV Cameras an Eye In the Sky For Adventurous Filmmakers

First time accepted submitter NRI-Digital writes "Could the use of unmanned aerial vehicles open up a whole new world of filmmaking? UAV manufacturer Schiebel and media company Snaproll Media recently teamed up to test Schiebel's Camcopter on an aerial film shoot. Whether filming volcanic eruptions or zipping through forest tree-lines, UAVs have the potential to get shots that manned helicopters would struggle to manage. It's still a young, niche industry, but as costs come down, these little vehicles could become a common sight on the film shoots of the future."

Re:A heavenly sight.

[Exrio]

I wasn't. I like my porn to be filmed from a little closer than that.

RC Aircraft = UAV

[bluescrn]

Go to www.rcgroups.com, visit the multi-rotor forum in the RC helis section ( http://www.rcgroups.com/multi-rotor-helis-659/ [rcgroups.com] ) Hundreds of amateurs tinkering with 'drones', some just flying them around a field for fun, others doing a bit of aerial photography with 'em. And they've been doing it for quite a while... A lot of the lower-end builds are stabilised by a combination of an Arduino, Wii Motion Plus, and the open-source MultiWii software. Higher-end multicopters can have actively stabilised camera mounts, and be carrying fairly high-end camera gear.

Re:Helicopters

[jeti]

Isn't the RED Epic considered to be good enough for cinematography? There's a more compact setup using this camera on an octocopter and the output looks adequately stabilized to me: http://www.omstudios.de/OMCOPTER-Flying-Epic [omstudios.de]

Already happening

[headfirstonly]

At least one noted film director is already using UAVs. Werner Herzog used a Skybot UAV made by British Technical Films [britishtec...lfilms.com] for the opening sequence in Cave of Forgotten Dreams [imdb.com] - the camera moves through a vineyard before soaring up and revealing the countryside of the Combe d'Arc where the cave art was found. It's an impressive shot in 2D but in 3D it takes your breath away.

Re:Helicopters

[Shoten]

Very simple: try flying an RC helicopter sometime. (Hint as to the outcome: helicopters meant for beginners...also the easiest ones to fly...come with extra replacement rotors for a reason.) They are incredibly difficult to pilot; just getting them off the ground is a herculean task. A perfect example of the learning curve showed up on a Mythbusters episode, the one where the myth was that you could cause a helicopter to crash by putting a postage stamp on the end of a rotor blade, thus destabilizing it. They were going to do it at scale with a decent-sized RC copter. They ended up having to abandon that approach because after a whole day of trying to learn how to get the thing off the ground without making it crash, not one of them had managed to do it.

Now, take that intense learning curve, and think about this...small UAVs [wikipedia.org] are the main thrust of the UAV market now. Man-portable and carried by platoons or squads, they allow troops to see what's over a hill or in a neighborhood themselves, without the need for them to have a Predator tasked to them, without the need for them to have someone else try to interpret the view without the context of what things look like for the ground forces, or the need for a high-speed data link so that the ground forces can see for themselves. And unlike a Predator, it doesn't take over 160 people to maintain and keep one going. They're cheap, they're flexible, and they're actually better-suited to the intended mission of providing tactical real-time data to small units.

But here's the rub, and why these squad-level devices are all airplanes. Remember that learning curve for a helicopter? Apply that at the squad level. You have just added a new skill set that at least one person in each squad would have to develop, one that has nothing to do with any of their other skills, and is harder than any of their other skills. Imagine if shooting a rifle was so difficult that for the first few days you were learning, not only would you miss the target completely but the rifle would explode. How many riflemen would there be? How would that affect military doctrine? I bet you'd still see archers on the battlefield.