UAV Cameras an Eye In the Sky For Adventurous Filmmakers 63
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."
Helicopters (Score:1)
Helicopters are where it's at.
Unless you want your video looking like it was shot on an iPhone, you'll need big, heavy, expensive cameras.
UAVs can't deal with those.
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I agree, I've seen it done with a Fishing Rod, a Helium Balloon and a Go-Pro camera.
Re:Helicopters (Score:4, Insightful)
A small consumer-grade HD camera won't do either, at least not for anyone wanting to make good quality film. With proper exposure, colour balance, and contrast (no overexposed backgrounds on pitch black foregrounds - OK that's exaggerating of course but you get the idea).
Those UAVs the US army is using nowadays can carry weapons and bombs. Those bombs could be replaced by movie cameras - the carrying capacity is not an issue. The air resistance of a camera mounted to the plane could be, though nothing a stronger engine can not overcome; the lower operational range will still be good enough for a movie shoot.
The main drawback of plane over helicopter type UAV is that a plane must maintain a minimum speed. And for many shots, like filming a walking/running person from above, that minimum speed is far too high, and one would need a helicopter for that.
And then again I don't see why we can't build unmanned helicopters like we can build unmanned planes. It's not that they are that different. Navigation is the same; flight control is different of course but I don't see why a computer wouldn't be able to handle that as it's pretty straight-forward.
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Re:Helicopters (Score:4, Informative)
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]
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The latest Spiderman movie was recorded using Epic Red cameras
http://www.techradar.com/news/photography-video-capture/red-epic-cam-footage-of-amazing-spider-man-best-ever-964445 [techradar.com]
Re:Helicopters (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Yes I know those RC choppers are tough to fly. But that are RC aircraft, not drones. Drones are supposed to fly themselves, as in operator gives instructions like "go from A via B to C and then back to base". Drone does the rest.
The small planes carried by troops to look over the next hill, that's more like an RC plane than a drone. Those things are usually flown within eyesight of the operator, who manually steers the craft. And even then one needs serious practice to fly one.
Anyway it should not be too ha
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RC Aircraft = UAV (Score:5, Informative)
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Helicopters are where it's at. Unless you want your video looking like it was shot on an iPhone, you'll need big, heavy, expensive cameras. UAVs can't deal with those.
Evidence to the contrary - the article is about a UAV filming with a bulky HD camera attached to its undercarriage. So it is possible, probably just a bit too expensive at the moment.
Umm, I suggest you check the OMCopter out... (Score:2)
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Naa, you live in the dark ages. Many of these small gizmos can carry the RED camera
old tech (Score:3)
I have an Air Hawk with built-in cam and with a little tweaking of the airframe, it now holds a digital HD camera (Hammacher Schlemmer pen cam, minus the ink barrel!), so two for the price of one (almost, the whole setup costs £90 including batteries).
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Do you mean one of the Air Hogs planes? You can get a non-HD Air Hog plane for around $50 at Wally-World. I know 'cause I seen me do it. I've been thinking about getting the new Parrot but they apparently shipped it missing quite a few advertised features. Waiting to see if they've addressed everything with the new software.
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nope, it's a Blitz Air Hawk with custom shell modeled on the Bell 222, in Airwolf paint scheme; SD camera mounted in the nose at 45 degree downangle and the H/S HD pen cam is mounted in the belly - pointed vertically down. Depending on the weight I may add another channel and put in a rotating axis for the belly cam.
There again I might go out on a limb and buy an Eskey.
That would be the same drone that was GPS spoofed (Score:3)
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Your headline jumps the gun; as the article you link to also says: it is a possibility, but we can't say what really happened until the crash investigation has finished.
Re:That would be the same drone that was GPS spoof (Score:4, Funny)
Possibly this is a screwed up version of "return to base" type of failsafe if comms were lost?
Surely the "return to base" would be "return and land safely" rather than "return directly to base and fly straight into it".
Re:Fox: When UAVs attack! (Score:5, Funny)
Strangely enough, the last message transmitted from the UAV to control was, "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave..."
The Camcopter S-100 UAS making dreams a reality... (Score:1)
"Now with the use of the Camcopter S-100 UAS my dreams have become a reality and I'm very excited for what the future holds with these advancements."
errrr
When did /. start promoting advertorials ?
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Yeah, because this place is the target market for $400,000 items. :rolleyes:
Wow! Cutting edge technology! (Score:3)
...That was used in 1985. The films "Natural States" and "Desert Vision" come to mind. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1518224/fullcredits#cast [imdb.com] and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167888/fullcredits#cast [imdb.com]
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I first heard about this idea in the mid-90's when it was used for a long flying shot in a big film (don't remember which) where they didn't want downwash to disturb the grass/water/whatever. I'm not surprised to hear about even earlier use. It's a simple idea.
I bet a hobbyist could do this for under $500 today.
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A heavenly sight. (Score:2)
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.
Porn! And don't give me that look. You all were thinking it too.
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Old idea, old teach, cheap slashvertisement (Score:2)
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Yeah, I know Rotomotion [rotomotion.com] has been doing this for years. Their YouTube channel [youtube.com] is pretty badass.
It's already being done, its called FPV! (Score:1)
It's already being done, its called FPV or First Person View flying and it's a LOT of fun! Check out some of the videos made by these users
http://www.youtube.com/user/nastycop420/videos
http://www.youtube.com/user/BKMorpheus/videos
https://vimeo.com/fpvleif/videos
If you want to find out more check out:
http://fpvlab.com/
Certainly (Score:2)
Sure. The bad thing is just that most of us, even if we might be playing a major role in one of these newly made films, are unlikely to ever see them.
Thanks... (Score:2)
Nothing important has changed (Score:1)
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I'm just shooting a moving story (Score:2)
Already happening (Score:4, Informative)
How far things have gone (Score:5, Interesting)
My father was a tremendous model airplane, and photography, enthusiast. In 1962 he strapped his Leica to the bottom of one of his radio-controlled models and took black-and-white photos of the airfield where he flew his models, and the adjacent industrial plant. The shutter was tripped by the Leica's built-in timer; he got pictures of approximately what he wanted by running a second timer on the ground and ensuring the plane was in right place at the right time. The timer was used because the radio-control equipment of the day (at least, the equipment he could afford) had only one channel, used for rudder control. He used black-and-white film so that he could do his own developing; besides the fact that he just liked doing it, doing his own developing allowed him to compensate for things like underexposures. (To compensate for vibration blur, present despite all of his anti-vibration efforts, he was always underexposing these shots.)
By 1971, the R/C art had improved to the point that multichannel radio equipment (4 to 6 channels) was commonplace, and the photographic art had improved to the point that small, lightweight motion-picture cameras were also affordable. To take advantage, he took a handheld Super 8 mm movie camera and mounted it on a wire frame on the fuselage over the wing, pointed ahead and slightly down, so that the arc of the propeller was just visible in the resulting images (to give scale). He quickly learned to fly very slowly and gently; images taken during even the most mundane of maneuvers would be enough to induce nausea when viewed on the screen later.
Because of the consumer-grade equipment used, these photos and films will never win any prizes for photographic art; still, it is always a pleasure to see something state-of-the-art in its time, turn into something available at Wal-Mart a few years later.
Added benefit for producers (Score:2)
Insurance.
I have a close friend who is a line producer and has been behind a lot of different shows you've seen on a particular set of science-oriented cable TV channels. I've listened while she's made phone calls for work, sorting out logistics and other such things...it's incredible what goes into a lot of this programming. Absolutely fascinating stuff! Well, there are a lot of challenges to the traditional way of shooting aerial, many of which have to do with nothing more than liability. There's the