DJI the maker of the Phantom drone has answered GoPro back with a direct competitor to the Karma drone announced last week. The new DJI Mavic Pro drone is extremely portable; even more so than the Karma and has obstacle avoidance technology along with ground awareness which is missing from the GoPro completely. It also has the follow me feature in more modes than ever which makes shooting with it a breeze.
If you thought you couldn’t get sicker about water balloons bouncing and stretching in slow motion think again! This time 1500 small water balloons are bounced on a trampoline with kids jumping to create some mesmerizing footage with the help of a Phantom Camera rental from aimed reasearch.
Mark Rober the creator of the video is a former NASA Engineer who worked on the curiosity rover and overall experimental scientist that does a lot of cool things in his life and shares them on his Twitter feed here! This time his nephews and himself enjoy bouncing with diverse water balloons while filming in super slow motion for an enjoyable effect.
Something that came out of NAB 2016 is the paper launch of the CRAFT Camera a modular low cost professional camera that can record in Pro Res and Cinema DNG RAW with more formats to be announced.
It is unclear at this point if frame rates will ever be higher than 120fps but since the 4k spec also includes them; it remains a solid option for 4k slow motion at 120fps or 5x slow motion at 24p playback. For a 4k camera the pricing of $2,984 for a full 4k Cinema package is not to shabby!
The GoPro Like competitor project Mokacam on indiegogo has reached their goal 13x over or 1329% with over 660k USD by their backers. The project is just hours away from closing funding and a few of their offer kits are still available. If for anything it is a very cheap way to get into 4k at 15fps on a small GoPro like camera for under $200 USD with options for a tilt screen, pluggable magnetic batteries and even a portable electronic gimble for the tiny wonder of a camera.
What jumps out is how good the image quality is and all the surmounted obstacles that the team successfully accomplished to get the camera ready for production. It is not as strong in the frame rates as the GoPro Hero 4 black as it is only 15fps at 4k but it is not it’s function to eclipse that camera but to offer an alternative at a very low cost. It also offers a 1080p 60, 120fps 720p mode and a 240fps VGA mode hence why we are covering it as a high speed camera.
It seems that GoPro is not quite done with camera updates this year. They just released a very small variant of the Hero 4 hardware called the GoPro Hero 4 Session. Some jokes have already come out about the name like the next Re-Session Camera to own. However this is more of an evolutionary and reductionist product than any release GoPro has ever made before.
The Hero 4 Black is a powerhouse little camera with great frame rates for slow motion and 4k video at 30p. Some have criticized the codec in 4k mode as being too lossy and we agree to a point. What interest us however is not the 4k mode for now which is absent from the GoPro Hero 4 Session altogether but the lower res Full HD and HD slow motion high frame rate modes.
Looking at the current crop of portable devices that offer slow motion is hard and it’s pretty much a mine field. Lenses differ, sensor sizes are varied and distortion can creep up.
On the one hand we have the smartphones with the Galaxy S4, S5, Note 3 and then the iPhone 5s. On the other we have the portable Gopro Hero 3, 3+ and the Sony action cam.