Just joined up. Have been flying an Inspire 1 and Inspire 2 commercially (PfCO holder), very part time, (PfCO holder) for the past year but have now sadly sold the kit as I couldn’t get enough work to justify continuing.
I have however purchased a Mavic Pro for my own use and am loving the portability. The Inspire 2 was an amazing machine, but not something you ever wanted to carry far, take on holiday etc.
The Mavic photo quality is very good and I’m working through the video to get the best settings for me there. Obviously the video quality won’t compare to my previous drones, but is looking good enough for my use, YouTube etc. Happy days!
Hi James, welcome to the Grey Arrows, great to have you on board
We’ve a couple (literally, only a couple) of PfCO holders here already, always good to have more, I think the experience gained from the test and training alone can be invaluable even for hobby flights.
Did you own the Inspire 1 and 2 at the same time? Which was your preferred? Amazing bit of kit but yes, not something I’d like to lug around either
Can I ask what you use for editing your Mavic videos?
A warm welcome to GADC, James. Very good to have you with us. Those of us using the Mavic for photography will be interested to hear the results of your quest for the best video settings.
I feel your pain re losing the Inspires - I’ve just sold my Inspire 1 Pro and four Olympus lenses for the same reason as yourself . I didn’t quite get to my PfCO ( did the theory, completed my Ops Manual) but stopped going any further due to financial concerns re profitable returns as there are so many UK qualified pilots out there now having well established contacts.
I had the inspire one for around 8 months an the sold it to my colleague who i was operating with when I purchased the Inspire 2. Both were set up for dual operator, but in reality the inspire 1 never worked very well with dual op as the picture for the camera operator was frequently breaking up or freezing making following fast action (we covered a number of autograss racing events) difficult.
The inspire 2 was amazing in almost every respect, except the FPV picture quality which made it a bit poor and of course the batteries were horrendously expensive and I would only get 19 minutes of flight time with the X5S.
Sad go see it go, but I wouldn’t use it for my own hobby stuff.
For editing Mavic footage I do a fair bit on my ipad using LumaFusion as the workflow is really quick. Load video via SD card reader and view 4K straight away. Really quick. However I also use FCP on an iMac if I need a bit more in terms of features…
I am sure there are some neaches out there to make it work commercially, but we couldn’t find much paid for work in a year of trying. All the usual suspects aren’t interested (estate agents etc) I guess as they have been happy to do it (illegally) themselves. Still the qualifications don’t expire (just the PfCO) so I might get back into is some day, but as with most hobbies trying to make money out of them isn’t always that easy and can take some of the fun away.
It is definitely the only editing app out there for the ipad worth having. As with most creative apps there is a bit of a learning curve, but well worth it. I am by no means an expert, but if you have any questions I will try to help!
Welcome James.
I’m new to the forum to and very new to flying drones and the Mavic is my favourite toy at the moment. Just looked into the editing app you mentioned and looks great. I want to start editing my own photos and vids soon. I take it you can add music to them?
Yes you certainly can add your music from your iTunes library (watch our for copyright issues if you intend to post on YouTube) or import from iCloudDrive, dropbox, Box, Google Drive or OneDrive. You can add up to three audio tracks and up to three video tracks, fade music in/out etc.
You can also mix in photos with zoom effects etc…
I can’t say how impressed I am with the app, it really is very powerful for an iOS editing app!
. I didn’t quite get to my PfCO ( did the theory, completed my Ops Manual) but stopped going any further due to financial concerns re profitable returns as there are so many UK qualified pilots out there now having well established contacts.
