REVIEW #1 - HEXAKOPTER XL
We want to follow new technologies and trends in film industry as much as possible and so do you. For this reason we started a Blog about our work, where we are going to share our experience and hopefully help you with you with media production. It is a bit unusual to start with such advanced stuff as aerial support, but we promise to take care for everything.
INTRODUCTION
As we reached over 100 years from Wright's brothers first human flight back in 1903, we got an idea to step it up with aerial photography and video services,. Buying an appropriate arieal equipment (a helicopter with six rotors) which is capable of carrying a DSLR camera, was our mission for the year 2011. In the March (2011) we made our final decision and bought the non-assembled parts of the RC helicopter. After some smaller problems with putting it togeather, and bigger problems with software malfunction, we finally managed to put it in a flight-capable state. The first test flight was performed just before the entrance into 2012, with a GoPro Hero HD camera mounted on. Although the helicopter is almost complete, there are some minor add ons that will be applied shortly. That includes a gyroscopic mount for an DSLR camera, a second monitor on ground with the downlink video capability, which will make the flights and footage capture even easier.
THE REVIEW
The Helicopter was so far the most expensive and risky investment for us (costing us way over 5000 €). After the major issues with installing and testing the software in the last couple of months, we had almost no motivation in putting it into work at all. If you attend to make and build a RC helicopter yourself with no programming and no modeling skills, we would strongly advise you a professional help for it. So with a huge amount of patience and some financal sources, we made it to the point of the first flight. After waiting quite a while for the weather to clear, friday December the 30th was the official day of the first arieal video test we did. We took the helicopter on a very open area in Ljubljana to see how does it finally work. NOTE : Do a lot of research before you test the RC machines, because we found some really useful information, which could go wrong if we didn't know them. Here are the tips we found, while researching the project.
- TIP 1 - Always turn on the RC reciever first, and then insert and connect the battery to the RC system. If not, your transmitter and reciever won't work properly !
- TIP 2 - Do not forget to calibrate the system, otherwise this can happen
- TIP 3 - Always take the things easy, do not rush into stuff, otherwise you can run into failures - ALLWAYS DOUBLE CHECK
- TIP 4 - Be gentle with the RC commands, especially while learning on the system. Try to conquer tha basic directions first, afterwards you can start to combine the commands.
- TIP 5 - Alway land in the 4-5m radius next to you, because you are not able to exactly see what is going on in 20m distance. Bring the hel back and land it.
After all it performed better than expected with almost no glitches. We had a little work in post production, where we put some frame blending to the footage and got a smooth final resault. After the first days of testing and reviewing the footage, we are full of excitement and new possibilities that this device will enables us and our clients.
Article by | Rok Ložar and Mark Pirc
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