They call it “rock climbing.” Although, sometimes this sport finds you hundreds of feet up, clinging to the side of an 800-foot-tall blade of dusty, dried, crumbling mud. My friend ‘Sketchy’ Andy Lewis and I are climbing one of the highest Fisher Towers in southeastern Utah so Andy can walk the Leviathan highline. The highline is a 300 foot-long tightrope of nylon webbing slung between the summit of this scarlet tower and an adjacent one. While he does this, I will film the event using the DJI Mavic 3 Cine Drone in order to evaluate the little-but-powerful drone in a situation that fully tests its videography capabilities — and us.
I’m having my doubts about the endeavor, even beyond the friable nature of the rock. The sky around us is clotted with clouds and the light is murky and drab. In landscape and adventure drone videography, it doesn’t matter how advanced your cinematic technology is if the weather won’t cooperate.
Compact and Portable Size
The highline has already been rigged by Andy’s crew. When we get to the top, we have to tiptoe along the drastically exposed knobs and fins to the anchors at the end of the line before Andy is set to embark. This is the first place where the Mavic 3 really shines. It is small in size and lightweight, despite the depth of its professional capabilities. I’d much rather launch my drone from there than from the ground. This way, I can be a much closer witness to the action. Also, I can be Andy’s active collaborator as we discuss the details of his impending, unsettling stroll.
Carefully, while leashed to the anchors, I pull the drone and the controller from my backpack. I launch the drone from my hand. Meanwhile, Andy wipes the orange dust from the soles of his feet. He carefully steps onto the inch-wide webbing that recedes into the distance. With a grin and a “See ya!” he’s off, casually walking the line. He looks like Spider Man tip-toeing a single line of spider web attached to two daubs of mud in the sky.
Improved Flight Time
Clearly, this drone was made for this kind of far-fetched assignment, given its portability and improved 46-minute flight time. With this much potential time in the air, we can be more patient and deliberate about what we’re doing. I can fly farther away to find more interesting angles. I can even test various moves and reveals.
We can continue to wait for the light, even as the sky dims, telling us that dusk is soon approaching. If the sun does happen to break through the clouds, we can still be primed to shoot. This promises that we won’t be faced with the all-too-common problem of everything coming together just as the drone is losing power, forcing a landing and battery change at the worst possible moment.
Hyperlapse Capabilities
I’ve been testing the drone for several weeks in the desert and mountains of Colorado. In this time, I’ve come to appreciate such a long flight time while creating hyperlapse. The drone shoots successive still shots while slowly advancing through the sky to create smooth aerial shots where it appears time, weather, and the movement of the sun and clouds have all been accelerated wildly.
With so many minutes per charge, now I can take even more time to fly the drone around. I can wait for the most ideal conditions, and test angles, directions, and trajectories before initiating the actual hyperlapse. In drone cinematography, the longer the battery life, the greater your freedom to be creative.
5.1K ProRes 422 HQ
Back to the moment at hand: it doesn’t look like the sun is going to show before dropping below the stark western horizon. Our saving grace may be the 5.1K ProRes 422 HQ file format that the Mavic 3 can write to its internal SSD. At first, I wasn’t a fan of this feature because I like to change cards between every flight. This is to ensure I can always recover the last bit of footage I shot in case I were to subsequently crash the drone in an unrecoverable spot — say, in the ocean or a river, or in a glacial crevasse, or on an inaccessible spot on the side of a mountain.
The advantages of such a higher bit rate codec are substantial. The footage better fits into the professional workflow of high-end productions. In a case like this where the weather isn’t cooperating and the light is drab, editors can tweak the D-Log color profile to boost the saturation, color separation, and contrast without the footage noisily breaking down. The bigger 4/3 CMOS sensor makes a difference with more dynamic range in not only video, but also stills.
Object Avoidance
As Andy walks the line and I look for creative angles, I’m grateful for the drone’s more advanced object avoidance. The topography of the towers is so complex that I sometimes lose track of the drone’s orientation and location. I’m grateful that the Mavic keeps itself from crashing into one of the towers when I make a wrong move. Also, I find I can use the drone’s alternative camera with the smaller sensor to zoom in as Andy walks the line. This allows me to see exactly where he’s located on its length without having to fly back into his immediate vicinity.
An Improbable Moment
And then it happens. Just as we’re all about to give up on the light, our prayers are answered and a thin blade of sky opens just above the horizon. The sun dips below the clouds, sparkles brightly, and flashes across the desert. Thanks to that lengthy flight time, I’m ready, the drone is in place, and so is Andy, still improbably afloat between the two towers. As the drone circles him and the sun moves into the frame, backlighting Andy, the lens flares beautifully.
This is true even in the brief moment when the last bit of sun peeps from between Andy’s legs. When you point the 4/3 CMOS sensor into the sun, the light splinters into tight sun stars and pleasing circular flares. This is lens behavior I’ve never seen on the Mavic2 Pro. For me, this alone is worth the upgrade. These are the shots that excite me most as a cinematographer — the ineffable moments that can only be created by a magical combination of light, lens, subject, and setting that are all so improbable it takes the viewer’s breath away.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been shooting Andy on highlines for years now — decades even — and it’s pretty amazing to witness the painstaking development of his performance art. Meanwhile, the technology to capture it has gone through its own steady development, and I feel incredibly lucky to be a participant in both evolutions. I look forward to further developing my own craft, as Andy does his, and as DJI creates successors in drone videography. This allows us all to bear witness to such uncommonly beautiful moments.
You can watch the whole video at AdoramaTV now:
