Saturday, August 22, 2015

Create Fantastic Footage With The DJI Phantom 3

Reprinted with permission from WSOInsiders.com - Create Fantastic Footage With The DJI Phantom 3

Having stock footage is nice, because you can make videos that look good about almost any topic. But if you are doing scenes where you need pan and tilt shots of a geographical area, good luck finding those for less than a few hundred bucks per 20 seconds of action. Hiring a camera crew is a possibility, but, again, you are looking at pricing yourself out of the project before you even get started.

Wedding photographers often have these visions of panoramic views of a wedding party, but actually getting them is nearly impossible… until now.

Enter the DJI Phantom 3 Drone with built in 4K video camera that also takes 12 MegaPixel stills. The camera and software built into the drone are designed for high end filmography – you take moving pictures that have no shake, shudder or pitch – even in windy conditions.

The Phantom 3 has a 4K Ultra High Definition camera (UHD)Â with fully stabilized 3-axis gimbal to keep your shots looking professional even in rough conditions. Its Vision Positioning system allows stable flight indoors – can you imagine having one of these for weddings inside a church? And for those beach weddings, you can get every imaginable angle with this camera flying around the subject.

But, weddings are only one possibility for this device. If you film real estate for a real estate agency, imagine how much extra they would pay for flyovers and flythroughs of a property! You can show the neighborhood and even follow a route that someone would take to get there to show how easy the place is to find!

Ever wanted to film your vehicle while you were driving it? With this drone, you can have it follow you around (with someone else piloting the drone – never pilot a drone while driving). The GPS in this device is powerful with a built-in safety database of no fly zones, so it knows where landmarks are and where hazards are located. Lose track of the drone? Press the return home button and the drone will come back to the starting point – even if it is out of range.

One of my friends has one of these that he uses for his farming. He pilots the drone over all of his fields to look for problem areas where animals have been damaging crops or where irrigation needs to be tweaked. In about an hour, he can get UHD video of his entire farm and be back at home on his computer looking at the results. He says the auto takeoff and auto landing features make this so easy he could actually let his son control it. The flight time is roughly 20 minutes, depending on conditions and whether you are piloting it through more difficult maneuvers. The remote will let you know when the battery is getting low, so that you can tell the Phantom 3 to come home.

I have this on my wishlist, and have set a goal to sell 5 of these in order to go ahead and buy one myself. I have the money to buy it, but just want to motivate myself to accomplish a goal before I buy a new toy. Obviously, I will be using it for business (that is what I am telling Yvonne) so that I can take beautiful videos for my clients. I am also planning on using it to spy on my kids (good thing they never read my blog).
So if you are looking for a high quality video drone, the DJI Phantom 3 is the one for you. I recommend getting the Phantom 3 Professional BundleÂ (that is the one I am getting) along with a hard shell case!

So for roughly $1900 you can have a very professional video setup that will allow you to drum up a lot of new video business. Photographers are already jumping at these, because of the wedding photography aspect, but Real Estate Agents who want to be ahead of their competition are grabbing these and learning to fly them so they can do house walkthroughs and flyovers without hiring a middleman!