Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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).
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
This is actually an old story a couple of weeks later very sadly the same type of UAS flew through its control cabin killing the operator. http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-kills-engineer-in-south-korea/ Don't expect it to be operating in civilian hands until that little issue is sorted out. Schiebel also have to answer questions about the few they sold to China.
"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 ?
I'm not signing anything
...That was used in 1985. The films "Natural States" and "Desert Vision" come to mind. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1518224/fullcredits#cast and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167888/fullcredits#cast
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Yeah, because this place is the target market for $400,000 items. :rolleyes:
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.
Lost control of the UAV and it crashed into the control cabin. Wow. Seems like a pretty big coincidence that it crashed directly into the control area.
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".
Regardless, I feel we need to require pilot licenses for any UAVs heavier/bigger than a certain amount/size. We also need laws protecting the privacy of private property owners before it gets too difficult to control.
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.
Lost control of the UAV and it crashed into the control cabin. Wow. Seems like a pretty big coincidence that it crashed directly into the control area.
The moral is treat your equipment right, and it will not kill you.
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.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
This is a hammered out idea, and just pandering for a small company looking for some VC money, and maybe a pre order.
Sig: I stole this sig.
This is being done already, and is anything but cutting edge
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/
Looking at you.
Go to www.rcgroups.com, visit the multi-rotor forum in the RC helis section ( http://www.rcgroups.com/multi-rotor-helis-659/ ) 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.
It reminds of occupation of irish? Souls of Lost leave from potato lack and arrive post facto ipso? Externally present, Yours
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.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
...for the comments. I know RC helicopters have been used on plenty of shoots before, but I thought the use of advanced UAVs with automatic navigation functions, coupled with an integrated HD camera system like the Cineflex, seemed like enough of a step up to be worth posting about. The video linked from the article shows some pretty impressive stuff being filmed. As for my headline jumping the gun, my original header was actually posed as a question rather than a statement; I'm aware that this option is still massively expensive and in the very early stages...
There have been remote coptercams for for at least 20 years. But a camera that can record 2k images with nice fast lenses is still around 10lbs bare minimum. A copter that can carry that with any stability is still kinda big and very loud. There have been some advances in drone tech but nothing that makes a real dent in noise, safety, logistics or cost. It's still a toy pulled out only when really necessary.
Support bacteria, the only culture most people have.
about women changing too close open windows
At least one noted film director is already using UAVs. Werner Herzog used a Skybot UAV made by British Technical Films for the opening sequence in Cave of Forgotten Dreams - 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.
Less than 500$ with a camera that is worth around 50k dollars and weighs around 10kg with optics?* No way.
I'm assuming that the camera was the highest end model with an ARRI Alexa M integrated. The camera by itself weighs around 7.5kg without optics. Zoom lenses weigh an extra 2 to 3 kg. And this doesn't include the weight of the mechanics required for stabilizing the camera, operating the zoom and focus and the electronics package required for recording and/or transmitting the high quality live image.
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.
Waaaay back in 1999, while in university, I had a small acting part in a movie. For some of the outdoor shots, they used a radio-controlled helicopter.
The rotor radius was about 6 feet (1.82 m for our euro friends), and it had a gas engine. The camera was on an anti-vibration mount, could pan & tilt, and carried about 10 minutes of film.
Digital video cameras have come a long way since then, so the costs must be much less today.
It is very likely that drones seen in some areas will end up getting shot down, no matter who pilots them.
The OMCOPTER gives wings to the Red Epic Also a bunch of amateur aerial videos posted on youtube using various quad, hexa, or omni rotor UAVs.
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 question of the pilot, and whether or not they have experience doing that kind of flying. There's the model of helicopter, and its suitability to having a rig put on its side (because that's how it usually pans out...special-purpose helicopters are almost never available for things that aren't major motion pictures). There's the rig itself, and how suitable it is for being on a helicopter. And then there's where you'll be shooting and how. All of this ties into the insurance coverage that you really need to have in order to shoot an aerial. The helicopter alone is worth millions; the liability risks related to what would happen in a crash go substantially beyond that.
Having a cheaper device with no humans aboard that is significantly smaller, inherently proven to be stable and effective for aerial shooting, is relatively easy to ship over distance and which has (as a whole package) a proven track record of safety would be a HUGE benefit with regard to the logistical planning and insurance costs. And if it's more flexible than a full-sized copter AND more effective? Total win.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The newer one has GPS control, which wasn't true in 1985. It seems like you might be able to do some pretty tricky shots using a GPS-enabled UAV shooting a GPS-enabled subject. We've all see onboard shots from cameras like the Hero Go-Pro. Imagine a UAV that could follow you from above up a twisty canyon road, jumping ahead to position itself for tight corners and so forth.