aerial videography from RC Helicopter - Panny SD9 cam and HVX

Justyn

Justyn

Veteran
Greetings all,

A rough quick cut of a larger project I'm editing for pangea adventure race. This is the starting excerpt from our first major client job with our RC helicopter mounted video rig. We shot with the Panny CCD SD9 camcorder and HVX200 for the ground stuff. Was an exciting airboat ride and we got some really cool footie. I'll be cutting the larger and more expansive edit and will post that later in the week. This was just a teaser and to showcase how good the SD9 camera cuts with the HVX. Really a pretty good day and our cameraship worked really well even despite a whole mess of things going wrong before we got to the job.


Hope you enjoy and feedback and comments welcome. We are hoping to provide high quality aerial videography and photography at a fraction of the price of a full-sized helicopter rig. Website and demo reel coming later. Cheers:


http://www.electriccowtheater.com/SCC/lakeSCC.mov



Justyn
Sky Cam Choppers
 
Looked pretty good man. Very smooth considering it is an RC helicopter. Now do you have any gyroscopes involved there? It just looked like a remote pan and tilt head. I could see this replacing full helicopter rentals in the future.

PS. what do you charge for a thing like that per hour?
 
Very nice, as filmismymedium mentioned it was smoother than I would have expected for an RC craft. That camera and rig looked like a pretty decent payload, that RC has some real lift (I'm guessing it must be about 1/4 scale).

I think you have found something that will have a good market. best of luck with it.
 
Thanks guys.. That means a lot as I've gotten lots of support through this site and I also like to give back. Yes, this is a scale helicopter. Actually one of the largest ones you can buy. It is gyro stabilized through electric gyros which function better than a mechanical one for a few reasons, plus if you have a crash with a mechanical one you are out a thousand bucks each and everytime. We are able to haul up to 20 pounds with the chopper.. and we do have the lift to handle an HVX which is in the future development ideas. We have been building and testing for about 3 months and feeling pretty good about our decision.

We have a ballpark for prices but it depends upon a lot of factors and will ultimately be something that's quite a la cart. We probably will be in the 300 dollars an hour range and that's for the rig and two operators. We have a couple of jobs lined up already and things are looking pretty good. I'm hoping to have a lot more demo stuff to show off soon.


Overall, it's been a good partnership with a pilot as it's way too much to do from scratch.. he's been into these things for 7 years already. I'll post a more complete final video when we are done..


cheers all.
 
Looks awesome,
most had be in developing to get this done!

Great work,
I would kill to have one of these (and a guy that knows how to use it)

What are you using to monitor the video.
 
Beautiful footage! It mixed really well with the few HVX shots. I'd love to see color grading done to it.
 
COOL! I'm wondering what your pilot thought of the extra weight.
I'm also interested in the tracking. Was it a case of 'best guess'?
I've got a Rex but considering I just ditched it the other day there's no way I'm sticking a camera underneath it...wait...I mean my camera underneath...any volunteers?:evil:
 
Thanks all. It's actually a Predator by Century. We've totally tricked the thing out with Co-pilot horizon stabilization (which didn't get used on this shoot due to time constraints), and we updated blades and a bunch of the controls. The video mount was bought from Joday at helicamsolutions. There is landing gear that retracts up and to the side so that the cameara has free motion. I'll post some video of it, or you can check out Jody's site. It does have some real wow factor when the landing gear goes up or down.


To monitor video we have a Range video downlink and that is being fed by the receive to our Myvu video glasses. They are the coolest thing ever and beats the hell out of bringing out a monitor as we have to be so mobile. They are really awesome and I have used them for jib work and remote stuff and even to check out some HVX footage outdoors and such.. Really cool.


I'll post more from our website when we get it up and running. We are shooting the Earth Day Birthday concert here next weekend and should be 25000 people there that we'll be flying over. Should be something really good.


Sonic, you could go with a mount for the Trex.. but it would have to fly a really small transmitting camera or possibly a small SD9 camera. That's a sweet chopper but it's on the smaller side. My pilot had one and he sold it to help finance this chopper. It's been a pricey but fun endeavor.. Hope I answered all of them.



The SD9 is a real badass little camera. I'll post more footage with it too.
 
Thanks for the info...once I have more faith in what I can do in the air, I'll be looking into that...calm day today...off to practice.
Thanks again Justyn
 
Wow- very cool. You are pricing yourself right since other copter shoots go for like $1000 per hour, but are a little more steady. I think once your pilots become more experienced in stabilizing the footage, then you can charge more.

C'mon man, you know you want to share the plans in the DIY section! :)
 
Thanks guys. We do have a bit of work to go to get it perfect as that shoot happend a couple of days after a crash during a test flight and we had to rebuild the whole main shaft assembly and didn't have adequate time to tweek.. and we weren't able to use the stabilization system.


As far as putting this in the DIY section, there would be too much to put in there.. and the fact is that none of this was really DIY except for some vibrational pads and tweeks that we did to this. It's a Century Predator Condor Gasser, with updated parts like a governor, all metal head assembly, stabilizer, and a whole bunch of stuff that I don't know anything about. We bought the video mount as building everything and testing just didn't seem prudent when there's a few on the market that work. There's some big expensive mounts and some very reasonable ones. Sonic, the one for your T-Rex is only like 400 bucks so it depends upon a number of things.



The insurance is good for bodily injury and property damage..we are good on that but no one will insure the chopper once it leaves the ground. We are on our own when that happens.


Thanks all and I'll share more when I can get it cut together. If you have other questions, I'm happy to help out. Also, to throw out a shameless plug, in about two months we are going to be offering pilot training and system building seminars. We'll be doing them mostly in FL but the buzz is pretty big as there's no RC pilot schools anywhere in the US that we know of.. and certainly not one with a focus on aerial videography and photgraphy.


cheers
 
Justyn,

Can you post up dates, times and places for the seminars or PM me. A few friends and me have been toying with this idea on and off for a few years now. All we have ever heard is how hard it is to fly one of these. I live in Orlando and would love to attend. I am also interested in booking you for a job this summer.
 
Zander.. I had wanted one for a while and teamed up with the right person to pull it off. You can do it too, but you have to know your liimits and the learning curve for doing this. If you found an RC hobbyist then you could really kick it into gear pretty quickly.. .but if you were learning from scratch there's so much to keep in mind, from the buidling, maintenance and then learning to fly it with a lump of weight dangling off the bottom. Personally, I can fly the small ones.. .but I have no desire to fly our bigboy, just too much going on so I'm content to fly the video part of things...


Brinks.. I'll send you a PM and we can discuss this.
 
here's a rough cut of the adventure race for my client. It's also a bit longer than I would have liked.. but the client wants to make sure that everyone who enters the races gets to see themselves a several stages of the race. I do still got some tweaking to do and such. Kind of a large file. Hope you enjoy and feedback welcome. This is also highly compressed.


http://www.electriccowtheater.com/SCC/Pangea26fineDV.mov
 
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