Leaving an interior for the street without a cut

Why it is hard

The gap you fly out of is rarely the problem. The problem is that the move usually joins another one, normally a crane, and for the cut to be invisible the FPV rig has to reproduce the speed, the angle and above all the inertia of what comes next. Matching a path is easy. Matching how it accelerates and how it settles is not.

Indoors, satellite positioning is useless, so the flight is purely visual. Outdoors, in a city centre street, you get radio interference, a public, and a regulation that is not the one that applies to an empty field.

And there is an asymmetry of time: the interior can be repeated many times, the street cannot. The window on a public road is bounded by the permit and by the traffic closure, and every repeat costs more outside than inside.

How it gets solved

In prep you work from outside in, even though it cuts the other way: first you lock the move that governs, usually the street one, then you tune the FPV move to meet it. The aircraft imitates the crane, not the other way round.

The join is placed where the image carries least information: a pass through a frame, a dark zone, a whip. There the cut hides itself and stops depending on both paths being identical.

The street half is prepared as an urban operation with its authorisation, not as one more flight. Permits, insurance and city flight conditions are set out on the urban filming page, which is where they live.

What it takes

Platform

Protected FPV

Cameras

Cinema camera payloads

Where we have done it

What goes wrong

• Interference. City centre links degrade, and the operating position is worth testing before the shoot day.
• The public. A drone in the street gathers people. Allow for clearing time, and remember the traffic closure has an end time.
• Light. Interior and exterior almost never share a temperature or a level. If the shot is continuous, the camera has to carry the jump without a correction.