Last week I rented a drone kit for work in the hopes that I could save some money by avoiding commercial B-roll. Pricing for video clips has gone up recently, and my total costs for a 4-minute video have gone past $1500/ea, which is a lot of money for an NGO. I typically scour my limited stock of company-owned footage before I go to the online services, but I have to be careful I’m not recycling too much, and I really don’t have a lot to begin with.

I picked out a DJI Avata 2 with a set of FPV goggles mainly for the price: about $300 for 7 days’ usage. As usual, LensRentals sent it in a sturdy box which contained a custom Pelican with all of the components. I watched a couple of videos online and then took it out for a spin.

This drone is about six generations beyond my old Phantom 2, so it’s probably 1/6 the size, in a compact little package, designed for acrobatics and not stability. The blades are completely enclosed and the camera is on a 1-axis gimbal, so any tracking needs to be done by moving the drone itself. This is achieved by using the goggles and a handheld controller, which is a huge leap beyond the joystick/cellphone system my old Phantom employed. It took some time to understand the control setup but once I committed that to muscle memory, it got much easier to use. I took the Scout over to an empty parking lot and used it as a target, burning through each battery in about 15 minutes. I very much enjoyed the goggles and I think I would make them mandatory for any kit I was going to buy—they make flying so much easier than squinting into an iPad in the sunlight. The video is crisp and stabilized, and the drone performance is impressive, but this is not the model I’d consider purchasing to shoot stabilized aerial footage.