$4000 FPV Drone vs $1000 FPV Drone | Can You Tell The Difference?

In this video, I'm going to be comparing my very expensive custom 7-inch naked Blackmagic FPV drone with the typical GoPro FPV drone that I normally fly. Will you be able to see the difference or did I just waste my money? Let's do it. I've been flying FPV professionally for the past five years and throughout that entire time I've only flown GoPros. Before we get to the direct comparison, I just want to give a little bit of a backstory on why I bought this thing. This year, I really wanted to take the step up to cineleft readers. I didn't have a ton of clients asking specifically for this footage, but a big philosophy of mine is to always just keep investing in yourself and investing in your skills, and this for me was just an investment in that. The type of jobs that I can get with this drone are really completely different than ones that I can get just flying a GoPro. Bigger productions usually shoot on REDs and ARRIs and they want FPV footage that matches that. So anyways, I was over at my friend Mitch's house a few months back and there was this transformer looking drone, this one right here, and I instantly was looking at it and just was like, dude, what is this? And what it is is a seven inch drone frame built specifically for a naked stripped down Blackmagic camera. I'd heard of people flying with Blackmagics before, but I had never seen one that was all stripped apart, similar to how they take apart GoPros to kind of save weight when you're flying really small sub 250 gram drones. And usually when people are flying Blackmagics, it's with these giant X8 drones with eight propellers. And a lot of times I have to hike to get to the locations and I just didn't want a drone that was super big and would basically take up my whole bag if I was going somewhere. So I wanted something that I could bring other camera gear, but also have a really nice cinelifter drone as well. It didn't take too much convincing for me to have him build me one. So just as I left for a month long motorcycle trip down in Mexico, I ordered all the parts and Mitch got to work. Mitch is like a mad scientist when it comes to cinelifters. He has all these different parts just strewn about his office and he builds these giant like 13 inch drones that carry a Ronin with the red on top. So he was definitely the guy for the job. When I got back, the build was done and this is what we are left with. Essentially this drone has two parts. So the drone itself is kind of at this level right here. And then this is the Blackmagic. The camera on top actually is super easy to remove. So they also make other frames that are built specifically for this for indoor flying like the Puffin. So you can just take the camera, put it on another drone. One of the coolest parts in my opinion are these analog switches. So you turn the drone on by doing this and then you hit record by pressing that button. Usually on my drones I fly with the DJI RC system, but it is a little bit safer just to have your visual and your radio controls on different systems. So with this one I went with ExpressLRS. And as you can see, this setup is a little bit bigger than a 7 inch GoPro setup, but not by much. And I can actually fit this entire thing inside the backpack that I carry around. Here's a quick little profile size comparison. Pretty similar. And after a quick tune from my friend Tim, this thing was ready to rip. And once it was built, I could finally figure out how much this thing actually costs with all the labor, parts, lenses, Blackmagic camera, and everything. And when you add all that up, it roughly totals around $4,000, which is definitely more than my typical GoPro Chimera setup, which runs right around $1,000. So this being four times the cost of what I normally fly, let's figure out why. So today I'm going to go out and do a direct side-by-side comparison of these two drones. The first drone that I'm going to fly is the Blackmagic. It's pretty much set up. I'm just going to plug the battery in and then kind of go through the starting process of it. The batteries that I'm flying with it are 4,000 milliamp hour lithium ion batteries from iFlight. These batteries are fricking awesome. When I fly these on my Chimera, I can get up to 20 minutes of battery time, but on the Blackmagic, just since it's so heavy, I get like seven minutes, which I'm honestly stoked about because it is such a heavy drone. And then basically what I'm going to do is just plug this screen in, get the proper settings. Okay. Great. So what's really nice about this drone, because it's so much smaller, it actually handles pretty much exactly like my normal seven inch, but I'm basically just going to kind of rip up this ridge. Another awesome thing that I have noticed and just like about this drone is it handles really well in the wind. Like it's pretty fricking windy right now and I'm having no issues at all. And because it is a little bit of a smaller drone, you actually can fit it through tighter spaces than honestly I'd be comfortable flying like an X8. So that's it for the flight. Now I just press this analog record button and we're good. Okay. So now we're going to fly the Chimera. I'm flying with a GoPro mini. I have heard a lot of reports of these breaking, which is super unfortunate. So honestly I can't recommend this camera at the moment, but the normal Hero 11 is what I would recommend if you're going GoPro. So I'm just going to do the exact same line as the Blackmagic. Again this thing just kind of a little bit gets blown around in the wind as opposed to Blackmagic where it just really cuts through everything. Sweet. So now we can take both those videos back and go over the post-processing. So in this video, I use Final Cut. That's going to be what I'm demonstrating this thing on. But if you are someone who uses Premiere or DaVinci, I know the workflow for DaVinci is really similar to Final Cut because they also have a native plugin that they've made available for everyone. Premiere, I think it's a little bit more difficult, but almost every day they're coming out with new plugins and stuff just to make it easier. And I'm hoping in the future that it's easier than this. But for now, this is kind of the process. And through this process, you will see the full power of shooting in BRAW, which is freaking amazing that you're about to see in a second. Okay, so now let's get into the post-production workflow. For GoPro, it's ridiculously simple. For the Blackmagic, it's definitely not. But I'm going to just walk you through the entire process. So because Blackmagic shoots so much data, it's shooting in RAW, kind of like a RAW photo. The files are huge. So this file right now is almost 18 gigabytes just for that one flight. You also have to use CFast cards just to handle the speeds. First, let's just see how easy it is to process the GoPro clip. So first off, literally just going to drag this into GoPro Player. And on GoPro Player, if you have bought Real Steady, it automatically detects that it doesn't need stabilization. Let's turn that horrifying noise off and boom, there you go, you have your clip. So then from there, you just kind of select which part that you want for this clip. I'm just going to select the entire thing. So let's go all the way, let's go all the way to the end. Boom, we're done. Okay, hit export. I don't export in ProRes. It does work a little bit better on computers, but I don't find that it has any quality difference at all. And the files are way bigger. So I always just do H.264. Hit next. I just put a little SM after all of my clips. Pick the location and hit save and boom. That's literally all you need to do. But for Blackmagic, it is a completely different story. And the first thing that I do for Blackmagic clips is because you literally can't even view them because they're shot in RAW. You're going to want to go ahead and open up Gyroflow. Gyroflow is a third party stabilization software where anyone can just submit profiles for different cameras. And luckily there is a Blackmagic profile that someone's already made. So I'm just going to drag this clip into here. And then essentially what we're going to do is we're going to stabilize it on Gyroflow and then we're just going to export that stabilized data and then bring it into Final Cut. Seems a little bit complicated, but it's honestly not when you actually do it. Cool. So we got our clip in here. We can finally view it and everything. You can see that vignetting around the edges just because of the ND filters. Not much you can do about that. But essentially what I'm going to do is I'm going to look up which lens I use. So it was a Laowa 7.5 mil. There's already a profile built, so I'm going to select that. Come down here, select low pass. Rotation is basically just the tilt of the camera. And I'm going to guess the tilt of the camera on this light is 10. I usually just put 10 in there anyways, just to get a good result. And then I'm going to come down here and instead of Y, X, Z, I'm going to do Z, Y, X. Hit enter. And then we should have a perfectly stabilized clip here. Hit play and boom. Just like that. Like, it's actually freaking crazy you can do that. And it looks exactly like RealSteady almost. But the thing about the Blackmagic is I think it actually looks better than RealSteady because it has that sort of like heavy feel to it just because it's on a heavier drone, which I really like because it kind of looks more like a cinema camera. So now that I have all of that, I'm going to come to export. I'm going to hit export project file, including processed file data. And then that's going to save a little file into the folder that the original clip is on. So Final Cut is open. And essentially what you're going to want to download is a tool called BRAW Toolbox. So essentially what it does is it allows Final Cut to read BRAW files. Okay, so I'm going to open up BRAW Toolbox and then select the clip. So right there. Open. And this is where the magic of the Blackmagic really comes into play. As you can see here, you have a ton of controls. When you're shooting in RAW, you can actually change the ISO after the fact. So I can bump it up to a thousand. I can change the exposure. I can change the color temperature, the tint. I can just change so many factors that you just don't have that flexibility at all with GoPro. Okay, so I'm going to hit prepare BRAW files. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this green thing over to my library. Cool. So now the clip is right here. I'm going to hit new project. BRAW. Let's do 4K. 30. Boom. I'm going to drag the clip and you have to do this with the whole clip so you can't cut it up yet. And essentially what you need to do is download another plug-in. I know this is getting kind of ridiculous, but I promise it's worthwhile. But when you want really good quality stuff, this is what you have to do. Okay, so once I have the clip imported into Final Cut, then I can go back and stabilize it with that clip that we exported from Gyroflow. And how you do that, basically select the whole clip, come over to Gyroflow toolbox, which is right here. And basically I'm just going to apply that effect. And then in the user panel, I'm going to hit import Gyroflow project. I'm going to find that file that I exported. Open it. And then it just applies itself on top of this clip. Cool. So this should be perfectly stabilized. Honestly, it's absolutely destroying my computer. So I probably won't be able to get it to play back perfectly, but enough to just show that it is steady. At this point, what you're going to want to do is make a compound stabilized clip. So I'm going to take this new compound clip, BRAW clip, boom. And then finally we can cut it up into the sections that we actually want. Because unfortunately the Gyroflow data doesn't work unless you apply it to the entire clip. So now that's a compound clip, I can cut it up to the spots that I want and everything. All right. So I'm going to kind of just scroll through here and find a good frame to color grade. And really this right here is where the magic of the black magic comes into play. Okay. So I went ahead and found a pretty nice looking section of this clip. It kind of has like a good range of highlights and shadows. So I think it'll be a good example to just kind of show how powerful the color grading is. All right. So right here, as you can see, just since it's shot in RAW, it is really poopy. It doesn't look good at all. But I'm basically just going to first crop in, get rid of the vignetting and then the little black bars. And then I'm going to go ahead and start to color grade. And this is, like I said, where you can really tell that this was shot on black magic. So first off, people use different tools for color grading. I personally use Color Finale. And what I have in Color Finale is actually a black magic LUT that I downloaded. So I'm going to come in here, open up Color Finale and apply this black magic LUT. So I'm going to insert that LUT. Already, you can see there is a bit of a change for sure, but you can still do a lot more. All right. So I'm just going to come in here. I'm actually going to bring the lift up. I never want it to go above a hundred and then let's bring these shadows down, kind of spread that color out to about there or so. And then I'm going to go up a little bit in the middle. And then I'm going to add some saturation, a little saturation to really all three of these layers. Then on the main tab, I'm going to add a little bit more contrast. And then the temperature, it looks a little orange to me, so I'm going to bring it a tiny little bit back to the blues. But already just from that, you can see we went from that to that. Just so you guys can kind of see how powerful the data is inside the black magic, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to actually look at the individual colors. So here's selecting an actual color. You have so much flexibility with the color just because so much more data is in there. And you can just go for different looks that literally just aren't possible with GoPro. Like you can go complete reverse red world or with like the road and stuff, you can kind of change the hue of that as well. All right. So I have the clip. So first off, I'm going to start with the GoPro and then switch over to the black magic. The fact that the GoPro does look so good in comparison is pretty insane as well. For something that's so small, so durable and just easy to use, the GoPro crushes it. And I still fly GoPro a ton, especially for indoor shots, but it just looks like it was shot on a GoPro still. It's pretty clear right away that the black magic just has a different look to it. It looks more professional. Even the flying itself, you get this like more cinematic feel just because the drone is a little bit heavier. So you kind of get that heavy camera feel with it. And for more higher end clients, they just want a camera that can match the cameras that they're using as well. Right now, I'm just going to show you a few other black magic clips that I've taken in the past. So did I waste my money on this drone or not? And more importantly, should you, a person who's watching this, buy one or at least think about eventually upgrading to one? Short answer for me is this drone is perfect. It's versatile, portable and delivers a much higher quality image, which a lot of clients want. If you're someone like me who's looking for something that can get you into a completely different market of clients, this drone is perfect. But for the average FPV pilot, should you look into getting one of these? Honestly, probably not unless you're someone like me, like in the situation that I just talked about. GoPros are super durable, super easy. The post workflow process like almost couldn't be easier. If you want recommendations for my favorite drones that carry GoPros, I'll put a little link right here for my gear video. But that's it for this video. Thank you guys for watching. I'll see you on the next one. Peace.