Quadcopter for large product videos?

Furnlander

Furnlander

New Member
Hi,

I am new to aerial photography, and wanted advice on whether or not this is a good idea and if so, what resources I should read and what equipment would be good $1000-2000.

I work for a furniture retail company, and we are looking into a convenient way to take videos of our furniture where we rotate a camera around the furniture, multiple times for different heights.

The first option we are considering is to use a video camera, tripod, tripod dolly, and flexible tracks around half the room, and then move the tripod manually around the furniture. We'd probably position furniture closer to track or use zoom to deal with different size objects, don't want to move tracks around.

The second option we are considering is to use a drone with many batteries, and program the drone to rotate around the object multiple times, each circle at a different height, to create a continuous video that won't need to be stitched together, and the size of the circle and final height at which it circles being different based upon the programmed path that is chosen, and which is manually chosen based upon the dimensions of each specific furniture. We do have access to a large empty room for putting furniture in for video-taking and a drone has plenty of space of moving around without crashing unless some bug/flaw or really bad piloting happens. I don't know about differences between drones, but right now I think the DJI Mavic Pro looks interesting and wonder if it is suitable for our needs :).

I don't know the feasibility of using a drone for such a purpose, but I would like to explore the possibility because I like the potential perks of:

1. Automated video-taking in one continuous video. I don't want to manually and steadily push a tripod or stitch videos together because we have over 1,000 different pieces of furniture we want to take videos of eventually.
2. More height options! And maybe can program a flyover or fly-under? :)
3. The stills from the video may be usable for photogrammetric 3d modeling if we do enough circles at enough heights. Not sure though, had mostly horrible experience with photogrammetry on furniture.
 
Hi mate I would not use a quad to many things to go wrong its hard to fly around some thing when you cant see the quad , to do this automated will need GPS and this will not work indoors
If it was me I would have a large turn table and a roof mounted gimbal or one on these from DJI
 
One thing you should consider if you're going to use a multicopter for this purpose is that the FAA would regard this as a commercial endeavor and the pilot would need to be UAS certified.
 
Thanks very much for the responses. I will look into the options provided. If GPS is required, we may have to forgo the drone option, because I don't think our warehouse outdoors looks good.

ringolong said:
This would work too, but a drone in tripod mode would deliver the best video for what you are describing. You could probably hire someone to film it too. Where are you located?
Click to expand...

We're located in Atlanta, GA 30336. The video-taking process will likely take place over a long period of time due to needing to assemble most of our products, so I'm kind of hoping there is a good video taking option that is easy enough for us to do ourselves. But if we end up not getting satisfactory video-taking I will let my boss know we may need to considering hiring someone who knows what he is actually doing :).
 
The newer DJI drones use visioning positioning sensors indoors so it holds position just as good as gps outdoors.

The DJI phantom 4 pro would probably suit your needs.

I am right above you in Chattanooga TN.
 
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