This lunatic is diving 18-story buildings with a $20,000 drone-mounted RED camera
The world of FPV droning doesn’t typically have much to do with the more aesthetic, cinematic of drone filmmaking. At least, not usually. Well, not unless you’re Paul Nurk. Going by the name NurkFPV on YouTube (and Instagram), Paul is pretty obsessed with FPV. How obsessed? Well, he’s obsessed enough to build an FPV drone he could mount a RED Epic Mysterium-X to it.
The goals are to capture the speed and excitement of flying FPV, but at a much more cinematic way than FPV cameras typically allow. They’re usually pretty cheap stripped-down action cameras, essentially, with low resolution and terrible dynamic range. Strapping a RED to such a drone, though, is no easy task.
Before we get onto the dive shots, though, check out Paul’s vlog at the top of this post going over the drone setup – which is pretty extreme. Flying a 30lb rig takes a lot of planning and preparation to build it in a way that was safe and reliable, especially if you want to fly it the way Paul does – which also took a lot of practice to learn.
But boy did he learn. Check out this clip Paul posted to Instagram dropping off the sides of huge 18-storey buildings. Hold your excitement, though, because most of the footage wasn’t shot on the RED camera, obviously, as you can see it in the shot. These behind-the-scenes clips were shot with an Insta360 ONE R mounted behind the RED. There is some RED footage, though, and it’s rather pretty.
While dive-bombing off the tops of buildings is all well and good, it’s not really all that practical. Certainly not practical enough to justify a $20,000 drone capable of shooting cinematic footage. But this was just more practice, as Paul was actually going to be filming a Bugatti Chiron. Not surprisingly, Paul posted another video to Instagram to show off some of that. Again, though, he only teased us with behind the scenes footage shot on the ONE R.
To go along with the Bugatti shoot, thought, we have another vlog on YouTube where we get to see Paul and the team preparing and planning for the shoot, the challenges they faced with flying such a heavy drone setup and how they overcame them. We also get to see some of the footage actually shot with the RED camera, too.
We don’t see much footage of the Bugatti shoot itself from the RED camera, but the crew went to record some rally cars afterwards. And for that… Yeah, they posted a bunch of the footage and it’s absolutely gorgeous! Here’s a quick side-by-side of the ONE R footage vs the RED.
The footage looks amazing, but I wonder how long it’ll be before they upgrade the drone to a high load capacity so they can mount a Zhiyun Crane 3S or something underneath to help keep that RED camera a little more steady.
As Paul gets more used to this setup, I’m really looking forward to seeing what he can produce with it. Rigs like this don’t come along all that often. Sure, some have the power to lift a camera like this, as we’ve seen Hollywood doing for several years now, but they don’t offer the kind of flying that this offers!
[via DroneDJ]
