An Uber-Steady Continuous Camera Drone Shot from an LA Street to the Coast

Video effects specialist Robert McIntosh was recently featured by Vimeo for this 2-minute video showing an unusual continuous shot captured with a camera drone.

It “seems impossible flying through signs, benches and fences from the street to the coast to reveal a perfectly lit Los Angeles all without a single cut,” McIntosh says. “And it was made with the cheapest of gear as well.”

If you value your gear, this probably isn’t something you want to try with your pricey camera drone. For this project, McIntosh used a $120 quadcopter kit fitted with a $5 camera mount and a GoPro Hero4 Black.

The “secret ingredient” was ReelSteady, the advanced video stabilization software that McIntosh created and launched in August 2015. Here’s the unstabilized version showing what the footage looked like before software enhancement:

McIntosh says that this was all successfully done on the first attempt while flying the camera drone “very slow.”