What are Drones?
What are commonly referred to as drones today are much more than drones. Traditional drones AKA UAV's are not actively piloted like our "drones" are, they plot coordinates in a computer and program the drone to a specific flight path. Many drones are military controlled and in the form of long range airplanes. While the types of helicopters we fly 'can' be flown autonomously and newer versions are getting better at this, ours do not for multiple reasons. Safety is always our #1 concern and if you aren't actively piloting the thing, then obstacle avoidance and emergency maneuvers are impossible (granted you are a trained and experienced pilot). This is especially important at the lower altitudes we fly at.
So then what do you guys fly?
We fly what is technically being referred to as s Small Unmanned Aerial System or sUAS's. Commonly these are called multicopters or multirotors. Depending on the number of blades they will be referred to as a quadcopter, hexacopter or octocopter. There are even dodecacopters (12 blades) and larger, but none of the bigger multicopters are in large production. So our multicopters or UAS's are controlled 100% of time by our pilot and not a program, but what makes these so useful for video and photography is the capabilities of the gimbal carrying the camera.
Our gimbals are industry leading with 3 axis of rotation and sub-pixel stabilization. We have a second pilot who operates this gimbal with a second remote completely independent of what the multicopter is doing. This piece of technology believe it or not is the hard part and main reason we're able to shoot movies with these things today and not 10 years ago. They're so precise that you can't even tell theres a big vibrating helicopter on top carrying it, hence our name HoverCameras. The video image just hovers through the air as if it were a floating camera.
Well now you know a little more about the difference between Drones and sUAS's/multicopters. Please contact us with any questions and checkout out our blog and social media pages.