A Tiny Drone Carrying a Deconstructed GoPro Captured This Incredible Dinosaur Museum Fly-Through

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https://gizmodo.com/a-tiny-drone-car...-th-1835201423

---- https://vimeo.com/331880754

It’s one thing to pilot a drone along a picturesque coastline, capturing
breathtaking footage you could never get on the ground. But it takes an entirely
different level of skill to pilot a drone through intricate dinosaur skeletons
inside a museum. So how do you squeeze a flying camera through such narrow
obstacles? In addition to steady hands on the controls, you need some heavily
customized hardware.

There’s no shortage of tiny drones on the market at this point, but it’s hard to
find one that’s maneuverable, responsive, and one that includes a high-quality
camera on board. So Robert McIntosh designed and built his own which uses four
closely packed propellers that each barely measure a few inches in size. In
addition to a low-quality streaming camera that allows the craft to be piloted
from a first-person perspective using a pair of video goggles, the drone also
carries a GoPro 6 for capturing 4K footage of every flight.

To save weight, the drone’s onboard GoPro camera was stripped to its bare
essentials.

A stock GoPro 6 weighs in at 115 grams, while a stripped GoPro 6 attached to
this drone weigh just 120.3 grams.

Dealing with weight is the biggest challenge for a tiny drone like this. The
lighter you can make it, the easier it is to fly. So to incorporate a 4K camera,
the GoPro 6 was stripped of its protective housing, right down to its basic
electronics and power components. For comparison; a stock GoPro 6 weighs in at
115 grams, but the entire micro drone McIntosh built, including the barebones
GoPro, weighs just a little more at 120.3 grams. The craft also ends up with a
much smaller footprint, which is important when you’re trying to fly it right
through the dinosaur skulls in the Natural History Museum of Utah’s collection.

The hardware is only half of the equation when it comes to capturing a video as
impressive as this. Simple tricks like reversing the footage of the flight helps
make it even more compelling as the viewer can’t see where the drone is headed,
but even the best drone pilots in the world can’t keep their crafts perfectly
steady. To achieve the smooth results seen in this museum fly through, a
stabilization software called ReelSteady GO was used during post-production.

Stabilizing footage usually requires a piece of software to first analyze and
track the movements of a clip; detecting jitters, bumps, and vibrations which
are then canceled-out by applying the same movements in reverse. The results can
be good, but ReelSteady GO streamlines the process by instead relying on the
motion data that a GoPro camera’s gyroscope captures during each recording. It
not only provides more accurate data about how the camera is getting bumped
around, it also eliminates the time-consuming process of having to first analyze
unsteady footage. For comparison, here’s the raw footage of that museum flight,
minus any stabilization:

--- https://vimeo.com/331880514



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