AERIAL FILMMAKER
DRONENEWS
A new gimbal takes to the skies, while a helicopter firmbranches out into drone technology and bigmemory gets smaller than ever WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH
The new Shotover B1 gimbal is the smallest the firm has ever made and is ideal for mirrorless cameras like the Sony A7s with a zoom lens in a drone. Like the firm’s bigger gimbals, it is still six-axis stabilised. Shotover says the B1 is ideal for mirrorless cameras shooting for web content, TV and commercials. The B1 gimbal comes with a five-year warranty which includes maintenance, parts and labour. No price has been announced as yet. Shotover makes a huge range of high- end kit including camera mounts to fit on Formula One cars, MotoGP racing bikes and even fighter jets! SHOTOVER HITS THE SMALL TIME! It wasn’t too long ago that a 500GB hard drive was a relatively large desktop storage device. Now, you can store a mammoth 512GB of data on a tiny Samsung microSD card that has read and write speeds to humble many desktop drives. The EVO Plus 512GB MicroSDXC is a Class 10 UHS-1 Grade U3 microSDmemory card with very fast read and write speeds up to 100MB/s and 90MB/s. That means it’s ideal for everything from drones and motorised gimbals, as well as phones. And as it comes with an SD adapter, it can be used in DSLR and mirrorless cameras and camcorders to record footage up to 4K. It comes with a 10-year warranty, is designed to withstand up to 72 hours in seawater and isn’t affected by extreme temperatures of -25 to 85C, airport
HEAVYWEIGHT DRONE
Although it usually flies full- sized choppers to get aerial shots, Helicopter Film Services has built its own drone to carry big cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa 65 and even film cameras such as the Panaflex. It’s called the Titan and can obviously fly in places where a full-size helicopter can’t. It was completely designed and constructed in HFS’ own engineering department. “The development has been going on for around a year and we’re building the production model at the moment,” said the firm’s Jeremy Braben. The Titan carries a parachute in case of an engine failure. “Others do have parachutes, but ours can be tested and repacked,” he said. “Battery management is a big thing; we’ve had to work around existing technology and that hasn’t really allowed us more power along with less weight yet. But as new technology comes along, we’ll obviously adopt that. “We’re also looking at a lot of other industries to market our drone. There are a lot of other applications and some of them involve small and very lightweight aircraft.” There is no news of the Titan’s price, but it’s believed HFS would prefer to rent out the kit complete with a skilled operator.
Little big card
X-Ray machines and magnetic fields. In our tests, it coped with the cold of a snowy winter’s day and the heat of summer in a DJI Phantom 3 Pro and DJI Spark drones without any issues. Samsung claims 512GB is enough for 24 hours of 4K video, 78 hours of HD video or 150,300 photos. Just don’t lose a full card! At £164/$199, it’s fast, has a huge capacity and is rugged.
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SUMMER 2019 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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