 Over the past few years, FPV drones have been taking over the creative and filmmaking world by storm. Everywhere you go, whether it's on social media or on TV or on films, you're starting to see more and more FPV drone content. However, like any new tech trend that emerges, people eventually are going to get over it and it's going to subside to the next shiny new thing. So today I thought I'd put this FPV drone to the test against arguably one of the best prosumer cameras in the market right now, the Sony a7S3. I'm doing this to discover the pros and cons that FPV drones have against standard filmmaking techniques. So with this film battle, we're going to discover what the solid advantages and disadvantages are FPV drones have when it's the right time to use them and what their place in filmmaking truly is. All right, so here's the challenge. I'm going to give myself 15 minutes per tool to make a 15-second video and we're going to see what type of results we can get while filming my car. That's so bad. I already have a hunch of what unique advantages and disadvantages that both tools have. I'm going to do my best to pull the strength out of both so we can have a very contrasting battle here. Representing the FPV drone in this battle, I'm going to be using the iFlight Nazgul Evoque 5 HD. It is a 5-inch drone, super well pre-built, well-encased, probably the best buy-and-fly drone on the market right now. For the camera, we are going to be using the GoPro Hero 10 Black and I'm going to be making sure to use RealSteady 2 as well. The iFlight comes in at around $500, but the GoPro Hero 10 Black comes in at about $400 to $500 depending on where you buy it. Clearly, not as expensive as the Sony A7S III, but I feel like we can still do a pretty good job competing against it. This cybernetic cow udder I'm wearing on my head is the DJI FPV goggles and then, of course, we've got the controller. It looks like a PlayStation controller, the TBS Tango II. These are ND filters. I've got one on the A7S III as well, but I'm going to put one on the Hero 10 Black, essentially give our lens a sunglasses, and it's going to allow us to turn up the settings and get motion blur in our picture. Let's do this. First round, FPV drone. Catch it inside. Oh wait, I didn't plug in yet. Okay, here we go guys. I'm probably going to do one, if not two packs since I already have you sometimes setting up. Here we go. Picking off. Yep, all right, we're good. All right, you guys are going to see already in my goggles that the image is very different from what is on the GoPro. One clear disadvantage already that we have about the FPV drone is that I can't actually see the real view that I prefer to. It's the view of the FPV DJI camera. So I have to approximate what exactly I'm shooting. Actually, yeah, I'm going to do something that you could never do with a camera to gimbal. I'm going to start out from here, from where this rolly is, rolly billboard. Let's try this. So fly past the billboard and maybe instead of going right in front of this Honda, we'll fly around it. Yep, that's definitely one of the advantages of being able to do sweeping shots. Let's try something else. Okay, I'm going to get myself to riding this needle and flying pattern over the car. Let's get this. Okay, lighting conditions aren't ideal right now because it is shade too dark, but you know, we're good. Okay, cool. All right, cool. I think that calls it. Okay, we are finished with the FPV portion of this battle. Next, we're going with the A7S3. Let's do it. This next section is going to be basically dedicated to the A7S3 with the RSC2 gimbal. I'm going to see what shots I can get against the FPV drone now that I've been able to actually experience. Now that I've been able to actually experience the differences that the FPV drone has to offer against something that has such precision and handheld likeness like the A7S3, I think we'll be able to get some cool stuff. Let's do this. Okay, for this demonstration, I have the Sony A7S3 set to a G Master 16-35 f.28 lens, which is quite an expensive lens. I believe the total setup of the camera with the gimbal here is like almost 7K. So a lot more than that FPV drone setup, but let's see what we can get from it. I'm going to try to go into the car like this, maybe add a little bit of a rotating tilt. Okay, cool. I can get super close with precision too with this camera. That's another thing that the FPV drone can't quite do. Oh, that's so bad. Yeah, it's a long story, guys. Maybe I'll share it in another video. Trace, and I'll use a mirror as a foreground element. Going to the wheel. I can't move nearly as fast with the A7S3 as I could with the FPV drone. I'm going to try to see if I can get a little bit faster though. I'm going to pull a little bit of a cheat code. All right. As you can see, I like my speedy electronics. So with the A7S3 and the Ronin RSC2, I'm going to try to get more of an orbit shot with the one wheel as an assistant. Let's try this. Let's see how it works. Okay. Oh God, this is scary. It's probably going to be so bumpy. This ground is not ideal. Hey, it's kind of working. Okay. Okay. Okay. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Okay. Let's stay lower. I think I like that. Oh God. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. I think that might be our 15 minute limit, to be honest. That was definitely an experience. Two very different experiences flying an FPV drone with thumbs and just seeing a different view and actually pulling the camera. Very different experiences. They're both very fun. Okay guys. Let's head back to the office and compare the final results. All right. Before we dive into the pros and cons of each device, let us take a look at the final cuts that I got for both FPV and the Sony A7S3, starting with the FPV drone cuts. Hold your applause because right now we're going to watch the A7S3 cut. Take a look. Okay. Now you've gotten to watch both videos. Let's take a look into the pros and cons. Let's start with quality. Now, when it comes to the cameras that you're comparing them side by side, the A7S3 and the GoPro 10, it is a hard competition to even hold because the A7S3 is just packed with so much dynamic range and a huge sensor, basically the size of the GoPro and so many features that you can use to up the game, whether it's S-Log 3 or shooting in like 12-bit 422. That's just really fancy talk for being really uncompressed, high quality footage. And when you're comparing that to a GoPro Hero 10, the sensor size is way smaller than the Sony A7S3. And that means that there's less light and less dynamic range you have to work with. So if you just took a GoPro Hero 10 and a Sony A7S3 off the table and started shooting the exact same pictures with the exact same angles, the clear winner would be the Sony A7S3. The next topic I want to talk about is price. This is also a clear winner because when you talk about a GoPro 10, even with an FPV drone, the DJI HD goggles and the remotes, that will cost you around $1,500. Meanwhile, a mirrorless camera for the body of the A7S3 will cost at least $3,500. And even if you don't go with the A7S3, trying to get a mirrorless camera of this caliber like the A7S3 without the lens is still going to cost you about $2,000. And once you add the lens, that could be upwards of a grand to another $2,000. So your total could range anywhere between $3,000 to $6,000. That is about at least two to four times the price of a HD FPV drone setup. You do not have to go for the most expensive camera model when you're first starting out. In fact, that is discouraged because then you are skipping over a lot of the principles that you can learn from using lower level cameras. But I'm just trying to say that if you are trying to get cool FPV shots like you're seeing online, the cost is actually relatively lower than you might expect, especially when you're comparing it to a high level DSLR mirrorless camera. So I'm going to give this point for price to the FPV drone. The next piece of criteria I want to use to weigh these two devices is barrier to entry. How hard is it to get into an FPV drone or how hard is it to start learning how to use an A7S III? Right off the bat, an A7S III is a high level camera. It is meant for prosumers, which means that there are a lot of different functions that you can use to maximize the value of the camera. But that being said, even if you don't know how to use all of the functions that it has to offer, there is still an auto mode that will let you just pick it up and let your granny be able to use it to a great extent. They're going to be able to get great pictures and images out of it from the get go. On the other hand, FPV drones, it's hard to make an argument for this one. The barrier of entry is kind of crazy. In my experience, learning how to fly an FPV drone is a lot like learning how to break dance. You are basically expected to crash in order to get better. And this can sound very expensive when it comes to flying something like drones. Thankfully, we have stuff like the simulator, but you are going to be required to put at least a couple hours in to get a good feel of how to pilot your drone smooth and just to get it to go where you want it to go. If you don't believe me, I will link the remotes you can use to go by and start playing on a simulator for like $10. Try it out yourself before you say anything. It is not the easiest thing to learn. So in this case, when it comes to barrier to entry, A7S easily takes the cake. Go, you can have that. Take the cake. On to the next piece of criteria. We're going to be talking about distinctiveness. And by distinctiveness, I mean how well your shots are going to stand out to others. Like I said, when talking about barrier to entry, FPV drones are quite a doozy to learn. But once you can get them down, what you can get with them is just out of this world is literally unlike anything we've ever been able to capture with live action before. And the scene is still so young. FPV drones have really only been around for less than 10 years. And there are so many possibilities available at this point that still are yet to be discovered. After watching tons of YouTube videos throughout high school and college and in going to school for film, I have never seen anything like this in my life. It is hard to measure this somewhat objectively because we are comparing a FPV drone with a GoPro to a camera with a gimbal. But that being said, gimbals have been around for almost seven years now. And even before that we had steady cams. And to be honest, the variety of shots I've seen that stabilizers offer are not nearly as wide as what an FPV drone can do. And for these reasons, I'm going to give the point of distinctiveness to FPV drones. This is going to bring me to my fifth and final point of criteria for this competition. And that is going to be versatility. And by versatility, I mean what range of different types of shots and breath can your device get. This one is a little bit tough to judge, I'm going to say, because both have their strengths and their weaknesses. The FPV drone can move fast and we can do all these different things. But to an extent, it can lack control and you can't get amazing close ups like you can with the A7S3 and a gimbal. Meanwhile, with the A7S3, you can use different lenses to get different images. You can put on a higher focal length in order to get close ups of the logo. You can't really do that with an FPV drone and a GoPro because this is fixed with a wide angle lens. But then on the other hand, when you look at FPV drones, there's just so much versatility as well because you can't fly up to a billboard unless you have maybe, I don't know, like a 50, 60, 70 foot crane. But if you just have an A7S3 with a gimbal, you aren't really capable of this variety of movements. This one is a hard one to grade. And if you guys don't mind, I'm going to chop this point in half and give 0.5 to both sides, half to the FPV drone and half to the Sony A7S3. Oh, wow, it's a tie. Who would have expected that? To be honest, it's tough to really say what is one better than the other. And the big reason, as you guys know, is because it doesn't just come down to the device. It comes down to who's using it. And you know what? Why does it always have to be a competition, huh? What happens if we take the best of both worlds into one and make a sequence working together? Let's take a look. I made an edit just for you guys to see what happens if you can use both FPV drones and a cinematic camera with a gimbal. Take a look. And with that, I would argue that instead of having to pick one or the other, learning both is ideal. And that way you are expanding your creative horizons to the next level. So whether you're trying to learn how to do cinematic FPV drone shots, or you're just trying to learn a little bit more about storytelling, filmmaking, content creation, stick along for the ride. That's why I'm here. I want to help you guys out. Thank you for watching. This has been Kai and I'll catch you in the next video. Check these videos out and hopefully they help you out. I'll see you soon. Peace!