DJI has taken the wraps of essentially the most highly effective cinema drone it is ever made – and the DJI Encourage Three comes with a price ticket to match its barely terrifying seems to be.

The successor to the pro-level DJI Encourage 2, which arrived approach again in 2016, is a giant improve over that drone in each approach, and it seems to be distinctly like DJI’s reply to the Sony Airpeak – one other Hollywood-level flying digital camera with a sky-high price ticket.

On the entrance of the Encourage Three is a gimbal-stabilized, full-frame 8K digital camera known as the Zenmuse X9-8K. This makes it a future-proofed aerial rig that is greater than ok for capturing movie and TV productions. 

The drone can shoot each 8K/25fps CinemaDNG video and 8K/75fps Apple ProRes RAW video, making its footage excellent for color-grading within the edit suite, whereas for slow-mo pictures it could possibly, impressively, shoot full-frame 4K/120fps ProRes RAW video with out cropping.

As a result of it has DJI’s DL mount, the Encourage 3’s digital camera can also be suitable with a spread of lenses. There are full-frame 24mm, 35mm, and 50mm choices, plus extra unique ones like an 18mm f/2.Eight full-frame ultra-wide. DJI says it is also made a brand new telephoto lens that is been custom-made for 8K aerial cinematography, although there is not any launch date for this but.

That is the digital camera setup, however what concerning the flying expertise? Regardless of its dimension and complexity, the Encourage Three can apparently be flown by single pilots because of some new clever flight modes. A brand new Highlight Professional characteristic claims to supply highly effective single-object recognition and monitoring, letting you focus extra on avoiding costly crashes than framing your shot.

The Encourage Three additionally has what DJI calls its “most-advanced omnidirectional sensing system to this point”, which is powered by 9 visible sensors, plus an FPV (first-person view) lens with a night-vision sensor, which serves up a transparent 1080/60p feed to pilots in low-light or evening shoots.

One other first is the brand new O3 Professional Transmission, which is a giant step up from the present OcuSync 3.0. This apparently enables you to fly the drone from as much as 15km away (inside your area’s drone guidelines, after all) or as much as 12km in dual-controller mode.

Naturally, you will want a reasonably good controller to fly a drone this superior, so the Encourage Three comes with the present top-end DJI RC Plus, which has a 7-inch 1,200-nit high-brightness display. And the Encourage Three is full of different pro-level options, together with 1TB of storage and new twin batteries that promise a flight time of as much as 28 minutes.

And that price ticket? A cool $16,499 / £13,419 / AU$20,469 for the Encourage Three drone, plus an additional $1,299 / £1,209 / AU$1,749 if you would like that new DL 18 mm f/2.Eight ASPH lens.

Evaluation: a brand new rival for the Sony Airpeak

Clearly, the DJI Encourage Three is an unimaginable cinema drone that is full of the form of tech that may hopefully filter all the way down to a number of the finest drones that almost all of us can truly afford to purchase.

However whereas we look ahead to its O3 Professional Transmission and 8K video powers to reach in additional inexpensive flying cameras, we are able to watch the DJI Encourage Three struggle it out with the Sony Airpeak S1.

Sony’s cinema drone made a shock touchdown again in 2021, and was designed to fly on a number of the similar skilled movie units that DJI had managed to drive its approach into. 

Naturally, the Airpeak is designed to whisk Sony’s personal full-frame Alpha cameras over high-budget movie units, which implies you should purchase it for $8,999 (or round £6,350 / AU$11,620) with out a gimbal or digital camera.

However whichever cinema drone movie producers go for, they actually now have some very succesful flying cameras for these dramatic aerial pictures, from each DJI and Sony.