I'm vaguely thinking of buying a drone cam with a budget of about £500. I've looked at a couple but not been blown away by them.
Anyone have any experience using a drone to film themselves riding? Bonus points if you can point me at a YouTube vid shot with it
I live in the tweed valley so ride a lot in forests (and also open spaces). I'd mostly be looking at having the drone fly itself and follow some sort of GPS locator / phone so it would need to be able to do that but also avoid lots of obstacles.
Have a DJI Mini2 which, apart from tracking you, would be good. It is small and light and relatively cheap. The problem is tracking and obstacle avoidance. If you want those, the cost goes up a lot.
DC Rainmaker has done some good comparisons on his YouTube channel for the previous and later/more current models.
Rusty Rides Gravel has shot some great stuff
I was riding with him the first time he tried it out. He got some good footage but not after almost using up the whole battery experimenting! Needs to be quite close to follow you properly.
Otherwise looks stunning, I would love one but can't bring myself to pony up the cash...
The Skydio 2 is the gold standard for follow cams, it can be flown without the controller just by using the tracking beacon. See Mctrail Riders channel. Way above £500 though.
Having owned (and still own the Mini 3 Pro) several DJI drones I would not trust them to follow me whilst biking, I usually pilot and follow friends.
Having a Mavic 2 Pro that crashed into a tree - the object detection is not up to high speed around trees. Not to mention the controllers are pretty large and would need to be mounted somewhere on your bike if solo.
The Mini Pro 3 does fit into a 7L hip bag though, just!
I have a Autel Nano+. It's a sub-250g model, like a DJI mini, and therefore easier and cheaper to license, with fewer restrictions on where it can be flown, than the larger drones. I chose it over the DJI on image quality after seeing a few "blind" tests. The follow-me mode is pretty poor (in fact it was released without one) but that doesn't really bother me for my usage, which is more about aerial images of ruins, tracks etc.
Mctrail also has a small DJI one, check out one of the recent videos. I think he made a few comments about it vs. the Skydio 2 while riding.
What you want is the Hover Air X1
https://thehover.com/products/hoverair-x1-self-flying-camera-combo?variant=46001310007581
Very simple to use. No need for remote/phone, just press a button and it will lift off and film you whilst following or in front. You wouldnt want to use it in the woods though, but for £400, you wont be able to great obstacle avoidance and follow me.
Drone always interest me, and I saw an advert for a DJI mini for sale, with three batteries locally.. with a grand total of 10 minutes of battery life each. I don't know about you, but my friends can take 5 minutes faffing/chatting at the trail head, so I'm not sure what use they would actually be, without going out specifically to shoot movies.
Can anyone who owns one confirm the amount of flight time then have normally? (obviously dependant on size)
How much faffing do you have to do, to use effectively & produce something you think would be worth showing your friends? (not even YT)
check out the DJI Mini 3 Pro.....some good deals to be had now that the Mini 4 has been released.....
Very few of the DJI drones have good enough obstacle avoidance for biking especially around trees. That said if you could stretch to a mini 3 pro, you'd get a decent picture and some avoidance. But plan your moves carefully. And maybe pruchase DJI refresh at the same time.
The Skydio is amazing but can be difficult to source stock at least last time I checked. That drone is designed for this sort of thing.
You can stick the minis (try that with a skydio) in your jersey pocket which is a great advantage over just about any other drone of its type.
I've whacked a tree a time or two with a mini and it survived.
There's that hover X1 thingy which is aimed at tracking walkers etc but the PQ is not great but is a simple design and a lot of fun.
