 Start at the camera. Start at the camera. We're doing it live. We're gonna do a whole episode right now. Here we go, you're in. We got matching t-shirts, baby. Let's go. I'm Lydred. And I'm Alex. And today we're talking about the five types of FPV drones that you should be thinking about as you're shopping this holiday season. Just a heads up. This list is gonna be the five different main types of FPV drones. It's not fully exhaustive. There's all sorts of different sorts of FPV drones. And as we go through them, we're gonna mention the ones that we have available in our store, cause that's how we support this channel. Of course, there are other options out there and you don't have to get the ones that we sell and we're not even saying that the ones that we have are the best. I mean, I think that's pretty good. It's the one that we fly. And if you do wanna support the channel, shopping with us helps us keep making videos like this. You can totally shop other options out there, but what we got, and hopefully it helps more of you guys start flying cause this is the best hobby ever. So Alex, take it away. First on our list is going to be a five intro. I mean, that's what we fly most of the time, right? We fly them for the show. You can put an action camera like a GoPro or a DJI Osmo camera on them. Typically, everyone who flies in this FPV community flies a five inch drone. Yeah, it's kinda like this staple. If you've seen any FPV video before, there's a good chance that it's a five inch drone. It's kind of like what this whole sport hobby community, whatever you wanna call it, this lifestyle was built around because they're just so dang capable. When we think about these drones, there's different areas of flight performance, right? So you've got your freestyle. You've got your racing. Those are the areas where these drones really shine. What about when it comes to flying indoors? Would you fly a five inch drone indoor? Not really. You probably shouldn't. You bump into something, you're gonna mark up your wall, you're gonna break things. It's kind of dangerous. So what about cinematic? Can you use a five inch drone for getting those like super cinematic shots? Yeah, you can. I feel like a five inch drone has its limits. You can really only carry like a small ashe camera like a GoPro or a DJI Osmo. And you obviously can't fly as long well. Our five inch drones really only fly for about two to five minutes. Where some other drones we're gonna talk about can fly a lot longer. But overall, it's still the staple of FPV. It's what we focus on. Since it's what we do most here, we've got a ton of options. My signature frame is the Skyliner. It's built to be super tough. Alex, you've got a signature frame yourself. Yep, I have the CL-1 VS, which stands for Vanny style, which is my style of flying. Both frames are great options. If you're kind of like more traditional style, five inch quad, you probably would like my frame. It's got, you know, top plate, bottom plate forms. Yours is a little bit more kind of tailored to your flying style. Right, if you don't know what you're looking for, our standard HD-1 and CL-1 platforms are like right in the middle of the road. They're true X, they're super durable. They've just got a ton of options for the five inch frame and you really just can't go wrong. It's the staple of FPV and you're gonna have a great time. What's the next type of drone, Alex? Long range drones. That's where you wanna go? I wanna go long range drones. I feel like long range drones are not really talked about enough. I mean, there's kind of this- Well, what even is a long range drone? What makes a long range drone? Yeah, generally speaking, long range drones, obviously, fly longer, meaning they're more efficient. So a long range drone is usually bigger because we wanna swing a bigger propeller. That way it flies longer. You don't get that nimbleness or that, you know, small size of a five inch or maybe even the durability of a smaller quad. But you have a big propeller. It's more efficient, more thrust, which also means you can carry a bigger payload. Yeah, so it's definitely all about that trade-off where those five inch drones are kind of in that sweet spot where the prop is small enough that it's very maneuverable and big enough that it can carry the weight and generate the thrust that you need. As you go past the five inch drone to like a seven inch sized drone, that bigger prop disc is gonna actually allow for more efficient flight. You're gonna be saccharizing some of the maneuverability. It's not gonna be quite as acro, but you've got longer flight times and you can generate more overall thrust. So you can carry a heavier battery, which then in turn gives you more flight time. It kind of builds on itself or you can carry a heavier camera, right? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the times from the filming stuff that I do personally is with a bigger drone, like seven inch propeller or even bigger sometimes because we need to carry those cameras. So what type of cameras are you carrying on your seven inch? Red digital Komodo's. Seven inch, you carry a red camera? That's nuts. Well, we fly what's called an X8. So instead of a normal quadcopter with four motors, we actually have motors on the underside as well. So it's eight motors, but with seven inch propellers. And it's pretty darn maneuverable. I have carried the GH5. I've carried a black magic pocket cinema camera. That sounds like a pretty crazy machine. We don't have anything quite that nutty here but we do have is the HD1XR extended range. This drone is a great way to kind of get into the long range game. Try it out. It's not the be all end all camera red Komodo, but you can still carry a GoPro with it and you can get much longer fly times, fly greater distances and see, you know, is long range something that you want to get into, right? For our next type of drone, we got to talk about micro drones. Micro drones are so awesome because they're a much more approachable way to get into all this. They're smaller, they're more affordable. There's less risk involved with flying them. And particularly in this time of year, a big advantage that you can fly them indoors, right? So. Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, everyone who knows micro drones has probably heard of a tiny whoop. It's probably besides five inch, I would say the most common type of FPV drone in this industry. I mean, there's a whole Facebook group with almost as many people, if not more, than people who fly five inch for just timers. I mean, these things, flying a little 1S battery, they're super cheap. You can build them for like 70, 80 bucks, like a really premium ones, maybe $100. And you can fly them around people and you're not gonna hurt yourself. You might get stuck in your hair, but they're overall super fun and a perfect drone to learn to fly a FPV. Yeah, during the colder months, it's something that the drone community comes to call tiny whoop season. You're stuck inside, time to break out the tiny whoops and chase your dog around the house. And there's other types though, micro drones we haven't mentioned. There's things like the DigiWoop. Right, that's what we have here at Rotoriot. It's a bit larger than the tiny whoop. It's actually got a two inch propeller. It's a bit heavier and that's because it's actually carrying a digital system. So it's not quite as carefree as a tiny whoop, but you can totally fly it around your house safely, right? No, absolutely. I mean, it's great. If you have the digital goggles, say, for flying a five inch drone or something like that, it's really awesome. You can fly it indoors. Here's a little bit more weight. You may not want to get hit by it, but you can fly inside, outside. If you have a nice, you know, little backyard or something like that. It's actually a really, really fun drone to fly. It's a great thing to have in your arsenal as well. And a big element of these micro drones that we're talking about are the fact that they have ducts or some other form of prop guard and that's what makes them just so friendly for inside. We've definitely seen micro drones that had unshrouded props, but they just never became quite as popular because having like a tiny whoop or a DigiWoop where the props have like a bumper just means that you can like straight up bump into a wall and just bounce off it without your prop stopping and knocking it out of the air. It just makes it way more safe and approachable for flying inside and around people and objects and stuff. So what about the fourth category? I would say we're gonna talk about CineWhoops now because that segway is right out of micro drones. CineWhoops are basically taking a lot of the good things about a micro drone and mixing it with five inch drone, right? No, absolutely. I mean, CineWhoops are one of those things where you wanna be able to fly around people, right? So we have those guards, but you don't wanna fly around people with like a five inch or a seven inch or a range. But you wanna be able to carry a camera, right? So you need that payload. So that's kind of where the CineWhoop falls in. You have basically the five inch components shrunk down with, you know, three inch propellers inside these ducted guards. You put a GoPro on top and boom, you can fly around people, get some really crazy shots. Really quick, when it comes to CineWhoops, I have to shout out Ben Wafenke. He's done some really cool choreography with some like karate people. Like it's an awesome clip. And I feel like in the FPV community, a lot of people who are getting into FPV before filming do like the CineWhoop. Yeah, I gotta shout out Nurk. I always kind of think of Nurk as Mr. CineWhoop himself. He's been supporting and working with Andy Shen of Shen Drones since the beginning and really helped make CineWhoop so popular. And actually the CineWhoop that we carry here at Rotorite is based on the Shen Drones Squirt. So when you buy a Rotorite CineWhoop, you are getting a Shen Drones Squirt built up with the components that we here at Rotorite have picked out to give you guys the best possible performance for carrying a GoPro and getting those like crazy smooth through object shots. And I feel like the final category is one that you may not expect. We kind of covered all the drone stuff, but we haven't talked about one thing, that's simulators. Right, may not have expected that to be number five, but simulators are absolutely something you should be considering shopping for when you're shopping for an FPV drone because they're way cheaper, way safer. There's virtually no risk. Yeah, I was gonna say you can, if you have never flown an FPV drone before, the best thing I always tell people is jump on a simulator. We really, really like lift off. I personally like the drone racing league simulator. There's also lots of drone that's out there. I mean, you have all these really great options for simulators and they fly with profiles just like the drones we fly. And I think in fact, if you go on a lift off, you can fly some of the Rotorite stuff, right? Yeah, so I know if you're thinking about getting into FPV drones yourself or if you're shopping for someone this holiday season and then about helping them get into FPV drones, I know you wanna jump straight to one of the drones that we talked about today, the five inch freestyle drone. The Cinewhip, the long range cinematic beast, whatever. But at the end of the day, really consider a simulator as your first step. Buy a simulator and buy yourself a radio to fly that simulator with. A great option is the Fat Shark 101 radio. It's only $40. And you can plug it right into your simulator. Our choice would be lift off. That's like $20, right? So for $60, you're getting a very real FPV experience and building the skills that are going to translate as you get into FPV. I mean, if you just can't help yourself, I know I was kind of like that and I had to just go straight for it. Buy yourself a drone and get yourself a simulator and start on the Cinewhip. Use your way into it. Keep that drone on a shelf for maybe a couple of weeks. Why are you playing your Cinewhip looking at it? Be like, what day? Yep. Someday soon, I wanna get into it. I'll say this, you won't regret the $20 and some practice on the simulator because you're going to crash your five inch or long range or whatever drone it is. Save yourself some money, get on the simulator. Honestly, I still, I fly simulators all the time. Yeah, no matter how long you've been flying, the simulator remains to be a great tool to build that muscle memory and get rapid practice because every time you crash, you just hit the R button and you reset and you're flying again and now walking down to the field and picking up maybe broken pieces. Or I mean, if you're really sure that you're gonna be into this, go ahead and buy the radio that you plan to use with your actual drone. So the DJI Digital FPV remote, that works right with the simulator. So if you got that, you could start playing in the simulator and then when you bought yourself an HD one, a Skyliner, a Cinewhop or a Vanty style, whatever, that remote will bind up right to it. And there's almost every radio that's on the market. It fits a spectrum, if it's an FR sky, if it's a Futaba, almost everything works on the market, it's compatible with all the simulators and there's tons of resources on the web for you to be able to get it working. So guys, I hope this showed some light on the different types of FPV drones that are out there. If you're just kind of learning about this awesome lifestyle and you're seeing some of the videos, how are they even doing that? What are they using? This kind of covers all the different things and all the different types of flying and different types of cinematic shots that you can get in the drones that we would choose to get those types of things. If you guys are interested in any of the drones that we talked about, including the simulators, be sure to check out the Rotorite Store. Link is in the description. It really supports us. Yeah, again, we're not saying this is the only or best option. There's tons of options out there and you can totally shop around and find something that maybe we don't have here. But when you do shop with us, it helps support our operation here in Orlando, Florida. It helps us keep making awesome videos like this. Absolutely, guys. Thank you so much for watching this video. Be sure to like, comment, hit the bell. Don't forget to hit the bell for bell. Is there something we missed? Maybe you've been in this. I don't know. Leave a comment down below. Let us know what maybe we should have thought of. I'm the Drim. And I'm Alex Van Over. We'll see you next time on Rotorite. Happy holidays.