I've just been asked by a potential client if I have a drone. Well I don't, and have never flown one.

I kind of presumed the learning curve would be very steep, and that a decent operator would need years of experience (like good camera work).

What do you all think? With the new technology can you pick up and learn relatively easily, or is it like I say above?

If it makes any difference, I'm in Guatemala where regulations either don't exist, or are not enforced (it would be flying in the mountains in any case).

Many thanks!

Easy to fly in GPS mode. Most people can't fly in Atti mode which means it will hold the vertical height but will drift with the wind and sto stop motion in one direction you need to move the control sticks the oppositie direction.

I flew my DJI Phantom 3 Professional right out of the box and got great footage. But I spend time on both the simulator as well as going out to an open field and flying in Atti mode in case something ever goes worng I know how to control the UAV.

In GPS mode when you let go of the controls the UAV just stops. Headed for a tree, let go of the contriols and let it stop before you make the wrong move on the sticks and crash it.

Also the rember that the controls are reversed depeing on if the front of the crast is pointing towards you or away from you.

Practice a lot with the nose coming towards you so you understand that to move the craft left you have to tell it to go right.

Like anything, it's easy to learn and forever to master. Most of the stuff you see on Vimeo you can re-create in a few minutes. Static objects are easy to shoot. Shooting something that's moving from the drone is very difficult, much more than it would seem.

How hard it is kind of depends on what you want to do with it.

For simple shots like fly bys of locations, establishing shots, I've found it to be pretty easy over all.

More complex shots will, of course, require more practice.

There is software to do a lot of the work for you, if you'd like. On a tablet, I can program in a flight sequence, and have the drone fly, say, in a circle, always facing the subject I want to film.

Another piece of advice is to have a spotter with you. Once you learn how to fly well you'll be spending more time watching your video feed coming from your UAV's camera and not see that as you're moving around for a shot you're about to crash into a tree.

If it's simple stuff like filming a tallgrass prairie fire I'll go out on my own because I can watch the UAV as I keep an eye on my video feed.

If I'm flying to keep something in frame I want to have a spotter to tell me of any obstacles in my flight path.

Like anything, it's easy to learn and forever to master. Most of the stuff you see on Vimeo you can re-create in a few minutes. Static objects are easy to shoot. Shooting something that's moving from the drone is very difficult, much more than it would seem.

I'd agree with that statement.

I'm a year and a half in with this flying game and still learning everytime I go out. I'm now qualified to fly a UAV professionally with a PFAW certificate from the CAA but still find it a challenging, but very rewarding, proposition. It's not just the flying, its looking after the batteries, keeping abreast of obligatory firmware updates and then the biggest challenge of all, the weather.

And its a money pit!

Go for it!

I'm a year and a half in with this flying game and still learning everytime I go out.
When people ask if it's hard and if I'm any good, I say... I fly 2-3 batteries worth every week. I've been flying for a year and a half. That works out to about an hour a week for a year and a half. That's about 75 hours in the air. Think back to when you were 16 and you'd just gotten your drivers license. A couple of months later you probably had 75 hours behind the wheel. I'm about as good of a pilot today as you were a driver when you were 16 and two months.

All good advice.

Go slow and keep in mind the further into the wilderness you go the more likely you are to turn the drone into a paperweight if you crash it.

If your thinking about a Phantom3 and if you take it slow, fly in open spaces, out of easy to launch and recover areas, focus on your flying and except what you get from the photography it can be a rewarding experience.

But if you fly in restrictive localities, under trees, between buildings, close to people and focus more on the photography than the flying things can get out of hand pretty quickly. If its a hard landing and all you have to change are props then you might survive to shoot another day, Phantom3's are pretty robust. However there's much more that goes into a rewarding experience than just the flying, the camera, knowing when to upgrade and not upgrade firmware, most the the third party applications that use waypoints to navigate a path require an internet connection so they might not be helpful.

You can get one of these, start flying and its pretty easy to get a sense of whether its worth the additional effort to use it. Its a considerable amount of extra effort to use drones for aerial if you don't know what your doing. I've seen quite a few producers who's first concern is principle photography take a drone to a location and never take it out of the case. Also its one thing to fly when your alone, its quite another to fly when others are watching.

Its easy for me to say its worth it, using a Phantom is literally child's play when you know what your doing, its horrifying when you don't. But good aerial can be so compelling, it can really differentiate your work but only you know the level of work you do and can decide if its worth the extra effort.

Is there anyone in your area that is already shooting aerial? Hire them to train you a bit or at the very least hire them to shoot some aerial for you to see if you can get a sense on how difficult you think it is. Again its also easier for me because I have any number of resources to get me back in the air if something goes wrong.

All great advice thank you. If I were to hire someone to shoot some material (say a full day trip to location, including some flying) how much might it cost? I imagine they would be reasonably new to it ... Don't think the market here could keep anyone too busy ...

It depends on the equipment they're using for the aerial. If there flying a Red Epic/Dragon then they're not using a Phantom, probably a custom MR and they can charge as much as $4000 to $6000 per day.

That's probably not what we're talking about here. A Phantom3Pro can shoot UHD (4K) and with some post color correction you can create some fairly nice HD. I'm sure prices are all over the map (literally). I've seen guys here in Los Angeles charge from $500 to $1000 a day for P3Pro and I'd guess they only fly two or three batteries in that amount of time.

Are there RC clubs around. Like I said earlier, if your around someone flying a Phantom for a day and you pay attention to all that they're doing you'll get a good sense if this is something you want to try.

Flying drones is not that difficult, it can be complicated but like anything else becomes much easier with practice. Probably one of the reasons people have a bad experience with aerial drone photography is that its actually quite easy to get into the air and start showing pretty decent results, trouble is those same people often get overconfident fly a little more aggressively or in confined spaces and when the drone does something they didn't expect they have no idea how to recover, they over react and bad things happen.

Newer drones like the Phantom 3 are very easy to fly, but only in ideal conditions. It becomes difficult when something goes wrong. You need to instinctively know exactly what to do to get out of a sticky situation (flying too close to a tree, human, animal, building, etc). IMO you need many hours on a flight simulator to get a good feel for how the controls work before you can safely fly a drone. Anyone that says you can pick up a drone and fly it with zero experience is wrong.

Sorry, I disagree. The Phantom3 is about as basic a drone as you can get. If this were an RC helicopter then I would agree about the simulator but if you don't have one this is about as beginner as it gets.

Like I said previously, take it slow, give yourself lots of space and begin by focusing on the flying and emergency procedures and after three or four batteries you should have the basic flight controls figured out. That's not to say your ready to do complicated aerial photography but you can do slow reveals and slow moving elevated shots etc..

The only way to get competent with a drone is by flying it. Be smart, choose locations where you can practice simple things like take off from one spot and land in another 10 times, Fly towards an object 50 feet away and land five feet from it and then walk up to discover if its where you thought it would be in relation to the object, fly a circle tail in, then orbit the circle keeping your point of interest in the center. And do all of that, and more, in an area that when you crash the only thing you will damage is your ego and P3.

Don't be intimidated, P3's are really about as easy as it gets, take it slow give yourself lots of space and did I mention take your time.

I agree with Chuck. Start in an open field with nothing around. Upgrade to a field with a tree or two, or an (empty) school yard. You'll get in a few hairy situations as you get braver, and hopefully learn to recover before you crash. This will eventually prove valuable.

If you see these videos of folks flying their drone a half mile from them, don't try and do that. It's how people crash. Fly the thing line-of site. If you want to shoot something a hundred yards down the road, land, carry the quad down the road, and fly from there.

Sorry, I disagree. The Phantom3 is about as basic a drone as you can get. If this were an RC helicopter then I would agree about the simulator but if you don't have one this is about as beginner as it gets.

Like I said previously, take it slow, give yourself lots of space and begin by focusing on the flying and emergency procedures and after three or four batteries you should have the basic flight controls figured out. That's not to say your ready to do complicated aerial photography but you can do slow reveals and slow moving elevated shots etc..

The only way to get competent with a drone is by flying it. Be smart, choose locations where you can practice simple things like take off from one spot and land in another 10 times, Fly towards an object 50 feet away and land five feet from it and then walk up to discover if its where you thought it would be in relation to the object, fly a circle tail in, then orbit the circle keeping your point of interest in the center. And do all of that, and more, in an area that when you crash the only thing you will damage is your ego and P3.

Don't be intimidated, P3's are really about as easy as it gets, take it slow give yourself lots of space and did I mention take your time.

Fair enough. I stick to my comments though. I think new pilot's SHOULD be intimidated. You can easily cause injury or harm with these things if they're not treated with respect. New pilots need to know the rules, and have some sim time before flight. Heck even the iOS DJI Go app has a built-in simulator - it's not a big task to use it for a few hours before flying.

I'm not disagreeing that the Phantom is incredibly easy to fly - but it's when something goes wrong that new pilots will often make the wrong decision (i.e. make incorrect controller inputs) and fly into something instead of away from it.

I decided this would NOT be something I would put money into, after watching a friend and sometimes competitor assemble his new investment on a huge, empty beach, and then crash it twenty second into it's maiden flight into the only lump of concrete in miles! He's now on his fourth drone, has done his CAA pilots courses, and still has made very little money in real terms. When I need an aerial shot, I pay him, and it's much more cost effective.

That's an important point, its not enough to be able to do aerial cinematography, you have to be able to do it well and efficiently.

But if you can use the 4K footage from the P3Pro, they are very easy to take out of the case, and be in the air in less than ten minutes. Again, it really depends on what kind of aerial you need.

Its very difficult to be profitable with the larger drones required to carry a GH4 or bigger. Takes much more expensive equipment, longer to setup and the people who use those tend to expect more complicated shots which are not easy to replicate from take to take.

That's the challenge of taking hobby grade drones and trying to apply them professionally. Things are getting better and I think you'll start seeing aerial platforms that can carry larger sensors and camera's with more accurate control and much easier to deploy in the coming year.

Lots of good advice and Chuck is always spot on. As a veteran of drone filming, I wondered what else of value I might add and only had a couple of other views.

Flying anything is pretty unforgiving of even the smallest mistakes but mistakes are usually the best teachers (if you survive it). At first it's really easy to make simple mistakes at all phases of the process, not just the flying part. It can be as simple as not recognizing something is acting abnormal due to having no experience or frame of reference to compare to. Like when is it really too windy to give it a go? Also, some people have a systematic, double-checking mindset and others don't. The latter usually have more problems with mistakes/crashing.

I joke that given a P3 and 5 minutes I could teach a monkey to do drone aerial filming. All the technology seems to be headed in that direction. Even with all the idiot proofing, there are still countless ways to do this badly. On almost a weekly basis I get asked to pull off really technical shots that only years of experience allow me to do safely. The difference is, through experience I know what the equipment (and I) can do in a specific setting. A novice doesn't have this benefit and can get over their head before they realize it with no bail out plan.

Most people find it fun to fly drones and when something is fun it is usually easier to learn. I taught my wife to fly and she really enjoys it. Getting some basic instruction is perhaps the best advice given here.

I've posted this before....you can get this mini quadcopter and practice:
Amazon.com: Hubsan X4 H107L 2.4GHz 4CH RC Quadcopter with LED Lights RTF, Black/White: Toys & Games (http://www.amazon.com/Hubsan-H107L-2-4GHz-Quadcopter-Lights/dp/B00OV4VVU4/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1448393464&sr=8-6&keywords=hubsan+x4+drone)
It behaves like the big ones, lets you practice your orientation, and it does not cost a bunch of money..

Jim Martin
EVSonline.com

Then there are those of us who just never will be able to manually fly these things. I have built 5 to 6 of these things in the last year or so, and disaster always stuck when the automatic flight controls did not deploy properly. I've bult small x's setups, and H setups, and hex copters. They all have certain advantages, but they all require experienced flyers.

I was never good at video games where you have to react calmly to the situations faced. When quick action is required, I tend to lose perspective quickly, and panic. I suppose a lot of practice would help, but the gear never seemed to last long enough for me to get the practice I needed. Frustrated, I finally realized that I should leave it to others, and draft one of the many flyers out there now if I need that kind of footage. .

I have a Solo 3DR and it is the first time I have ever flown anything.
Like others have said....start out VERY simple and don't take on
too much at once. First, I just practiced takeoff and landing.
With the Solo, it's easy, you just press a button to take off
and it hovers in one place, about 15 feet in the air. I practiced
manually landing without using the return to home button.
Don't get impatient and try to do too much. Nice open
places, fly at fairly slow speeds, stay away from objects.
Next, I got down to 4 or 5 feet off the ground and flew over
the ground in one direction. You can start adding gradual climbs
and turns, but don't get into anything that requires major 'stick skills'
right away. Be patient and learn the basics, don't get overconfident
by how easy it seems. Be overly safety conscious, The reckless
guys make the news, and I have received several compliments from
bystanders about how careful I was. People WILL want to watch and talk to you,
these quads are all the rage right now, so be a good ambassador for all
of us and show everyone that it is possible to be a responsible operator.

People WILL want to watch and talk to you, these quads are all the rage right now, so be a good ambassador for all of us and show everyone that it is possible to be a responsible operator.
This. A thousand times this.

The word on the street about drones is that ISIS wants to bomb Iowa with them and that they are also useful for pedophiles to peek in your windows with. You, the quad operator, are a one-man PR campaign for drones. Be the good PR campaign, not the reckless PR campaign.