How do you determine whether to use a drone or a helicopter when you create your aerial videos? Let us take a glance at the advantages and disadvantages of both.
Even the famous directors in the world need to think about budgets and what’s actually possible to accomplish with the resources available to them. These roadblocks and stepping stones are nothing new, just part of film-making at its core.
Making a movie or a film is always a mountain of work, and it can look difficult starting from the bottom. However, in recent years, famous companies like DJI, Sony, and many others have released tools and cameras to help modern filmmakers tell stories nearest to their original vision, more so than any other time.
A prime example of the accessibility is aerial photography. When you once required a helicopter with a large rig and crew, you can now control a flying camera with the Smartphone in your hand. What a great time, yeah?
Well with this facility has caused some frustrating yet certain limitations to the art form. Finding the right approval and places to use a drone can be complicated, especially if you live in a city.
We asked the question: starting from scratch, what’s the simplest way to find good looking aerial videos? In case you have access to a drone and a cheap helicopter flight (they can be less expensive than you would think), which should you choose? Let us find out.
To beat this test, we opted to use a Mavic 2 Pro vs. Sony A7III attached to a Ronin-S Gimbal. Picture quality aside, this comparison is more of a look at the ease and process of shooting your footage.
Low-Light Performance
Here’s the biggest take away from this experiment: low-light is in your hands. With using a drone, what we mean is, you are always going to be limited to the type of camera that’s attached to it. Luckily for us, drones are improving in their low-light performance. However, still going to be noise if you’re trying to shoot aerial videos in the night or in the weak light times of the day. So, when you are shooting with the helicopter, you have the freedom to use whichever camera you can.
Getting Approval to Fly Your Drone
It’s no secret that flying your drone can be complicated. Whether you want to operate in a city or outside it, take numerous precautions to run the drone in the safest manner possible. Obtaining approval from the FAA is one of the measures that are required before you take off the floor.
One of the hurdles is currently getting approval from airports to fly within 5 miles of their location. There are always more airports and helipads than you would think it’s best to test for them before you do anything. It is best to play it safe when it comes to anything aerial.
Which is Better?
We are sure you already knew the answer to this question, but leasing or purchasing a drone is easier than renting a helicopter flight. However, it’s important to mention that the act of renting a helicopter and flying encompassing a city with your camera isn’t impracticable. That childhood dream of hanging out the side of a flying chopper using a camera is really something you can do…it just costs a little bit.
Side Note: shooting out of the helicopter in the sky presented a few issues, like shaking. The majority of the shots in the aerial videos include warp stabilizer on it. Be sure that you bring a gimbal as operating handheld will yield quite unusable shots. Fly your chopper. Live your life.
Shooting Aerial Videos Using A Helicopter
Aerial videography has popped up in the past few years, mainly due to drones. But did you know that photography has existed for decades using helicopters and planes? There is a lot of advantages to shooting aerial videos from a helicopter over a drone.
Taking a bird’s eye view for your video can boost audience participation and production value immensely. It’s a scene that will never get forgotten, and sometimes entire videos are shot with just drones.
Today people are big fan drones. Drones are popping everywhere – military, toys, surveillance, racing, and photography/videography drones.
Drones are not without limitations and their flaws, however. The drawback to drones is flight time and that the lens options available. The most common drones are quadcopters that have 4 rotors and can only take a much lighter camera or payload. The GoPro is a camera for drones today.
Despite the excellent picture quality of GoPros, they are severely constrained in the lens option available. In actuality, you have one choice of the lens using any GoPro camera.
You do, however, have different shooting options, which range from Narrow, Medium, Wide, and SuperWide- but these options simply crop in on the same lens.
There were occasions when you wanted to use better lenses for aerial photography as your job demands it. You can use a bigger drone, such as an octocopter or hexacopter, which has eight rotors and six that could carry cameras.
Drone Batteries last about 20 minutes in the best-case scenario. Best practices recommend that you always land your drone with you and have a 15% battery left. A drone that runs out of batteries’ flight can be extremely dangerous and fall on damage property or innocent bystanders.
Batteries are also affected by atmospheric conditions. Payload, winds, and age all affect the range of a battery, so it’s important to maintain and routinely check your batteries.
The workaround is to get more batteries. This will let you remain in the air longer, but you still need to land the drone and replace the battery on the ground. This can be time-consuming and expensive, depending on the scenes you are capturing.
Additionally, you can use a helicopter for Aerial Videos.
There are negatives and positives to both alternatives, so let’s break them down.
Shooting with a helicopter means that you can go higher and cover broad areas in a fast amount of time. You’ll be following strict FAA laws, but if you have an expert pilot, you can get away with a lot.
Drones are subjected to FAA laws. In reality, you are not allowed to fly a drone within a 5-mile range of a commercial airport without getting FAA approval, which isn’t easy to get.
Helicopters are also expensive to fly and function. You cannot afford a helicopter if your budget is small. If you fly high in a helicopter that can accommodate 4 people, including the pilot.
What is great about the experience is that you can shoot 4K pictures with expert Veydra Cinema lenses on a GH4. The Veydra Lenses are high-quality glass choices that were released in late 2014. You will be able to fly at high and low heights and get unbelievable shots that you wouldn’t be able to capture with a drone.
To stabilize the shots, you can use any tool like the DJI Ronin. This will let you get buttery smooth shots in a dual operator setup. One operator holds the device and controls the camera, while another operator uses a joystick monitoring the shots and composition.
The Ronin provides for 3-axis stabilization and also the option to remotely guide the location of the camera. When you’re operating from a bird’s eye view and your target is far away, you don’t notice much bounce. However, still, a helicopter is continually shaking and vibrating, so anything you can do to stabilize the camera is ideal.
If you use this setup, ensure to bring an additional battery for the Gimbal or Ronin stabilizer of your preference. Since the helicopter is continually shaking, they tend to work the motors harder and use more energy from the batteries.
A Dual-Operator Setup Rocks!
Using dual Operators enables you to get much more solid, smoother shots, and the results are astounding. The smooth tilting, panning, and rolling keeps your pictures stable and level. It also lets you remain further back and keep calm while the second operator can control the unit. Utilizing two operators from a helicopter is recommend.
Other Helicopter Options
Another option when shooting using a helicopter would be to use a Shotoveror Cineflex camera system. These systems attach to the front of the helicopter and managed remotely from an operator sitting inside.
Both these choices have a built-in stabilization and controls for focus, iris, and zoom. You have possibly seen shots that came from one of these systems in National Geographic shows or car commercials. They are amazing but also prohibitively costly for most shoots.
Helicopters are amazing for aerial videos or photographs and make it possible for you to do so much. Here are the best advantages of shooting from a helicopter:
- Camera and lens options available are almost endless
- Time in the air is extremely long. You can comfortably spend times in a helicopter
- Area coverage is broad
- Speed (wind) and height are much less restricted vs. a drone