Hover X1 Pocket-Sized Self-Flying Camera Review

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good day folks Sean here from Air photography So today we're going to be taking a look at the hover X1 drone this is from the same company that brought us the V copter Falcon and the original hover now I know what you're probably thinking and I was thinking the exact same thing the hover drone is gimmicky it's a toy in fact when they first contacted me several months ago about taking a look at it I just didn't respond to the email because it wasn't really a product I was interested in but they were quite persistent I received several emails from them over the last couple months and finally one day I was bored I thought yeah maybe I'll just take a quick look at the email and the product and I was actually quite impressed by the quality of video that it was able to capture and it had some really unique features and with the vlogging I've been doing this summer I thought well maybe this might actually be a good tool for me so I thought yeah I'll take a look at it now don't be going and selling your mavics anytime soon because this isn't really geared to a person who wants to capture aerial cinematic footage I think this is geared to very specific type of Creator now as you can see it's a foldable drone and it's very small it comes in at like 125 grams something like that and it just folds out so carrying something like this with you in a pocket or a backpack doesn't add any bulk it doesn't add any weight so it's not inconvenient to bring along and the beauty about this thing is that it's fully autonomous so you don't need a phone to fly it however they do have a nice companion app and we will get into that here in a minute but it is very simple to use there's two buttons on it you power it on you select the mode and it will just take off and they've designed it so you don't even need the app at all most of the settings you can change just by using the button there for example how far it flies how long it flies for all that can be done on the buttons but there's one feature on this that just absolutely blew me away and that's the ability to take out the sound of the Drone while you're recording you can launch the app on your phone start recording with the Drone and the AI is going to remove the Drone sounds so you can actually use the audio and do some commentary and it works quite well I'll just show you a quick demonstration of that now so I'm going to show you a quick demonstration right now how the AI can remove the Drone noise from the video it's actually really interesting how it works so let's go ahead here we're going to power on the Drone and we do so by pressing the power button at the top long press until the green light on the front turns on there we go there then we unfold it now normally that's all we would have to do we could now just get the Drone hovering or doing one of its predetermined flight paths because as mentioned this is designed to be flown autonomously you don't need the app at all but in this scenario we do want to launch the app because it's going to be the app that runs the AI algorithm to get rid of the Drone noise so let's go ahead we'll launch the hover app all you have to do is connect to the hover drone you don't have to do anything else and then you just hold your phone or put it in a pocket now I've just got the Drone set to hover right now as mentioned there are five different flight modes but for this demonstration we'll just use hover so now all I have to do is press the power button just a quick press and it will take off right from the palm of my hand however [Music] and there we go the Drone is now hovering and I can move around to different spots and the Drone will stay locked on me and what you're hearing right now is on my iPhone so you're going to hear the Drone noise in the background but if I switch over to the hover camera you'll notice that the Drone noise is now gone and it actually works pretty good sometimes the audio gets a little weird but for the most part it's very usable I do notice that it does change your voice slightly but not very bad at all nothing that I would actually be concerned about so yeah I'm pretty happy with the way that works now when it comes time to land the Drone all we have to do is put our Palm down in front of it and it will just go ahead and land so very slick how that works and it's very reliable I've had this for about a week now and it just works every time and it is a complete enclosed design here so the propellers are completely enclosed so it is very safe so let's go ahead here and we'll take a look at some of the other flight modes now as mentioned there's five different modes on there plus a spot you can create your own pre-made mode and it is simple as pressing the mode button but right now we're in Hover but if I press the mode button so it's gone to the zoom out mode and we'll take a look at all these here in a second the next one is this thing can actually follow you from the back and from the front and again we're going to test that out and it can actually fly up to 20 kilometers an hour so if you're riding a bike or something like that you know you could get some pretty interesting footage now you just have to keep in mind there's no obstacle avoidance so you do have to take precautions the next one is it has an orbit mode so it can Circle you and the last one is called bird's eye and what's really interesting in the way they've developed this is like I said you do not have to launch the app of course you can launch the app to change all the settings and parameters of all the different intelligent flight modes but you can actually press and hold that mode button when you're in the mode that you want for example we're in bird mode right now but watch when I press and hold it 15 meters bird eye so now it's going to fly up to 15 meters if I hold it again now it's going to go up to 5 meters so you can adjust all the different settings right from the Drone itself and that's what makes it such a quick Deployable drone you can just pull it out get your shot put it back and be on your way now a couple things to keep in mind with this drone because it is so small and lightweight it's 125 grams which is important because in some countries that's going to mean there's going to be a lot less regulations especially in a place here like Canada we don't have to follow all the Drone rules when drones are this small but because it is lightweight you can't really fly it on overly windy days you know light Breeze is okay but I think the wind has to be under 7.9 meters a second something like that and when you launch the app for the first time they also give you a few other tips about it first of all it only flies 15 meters high so you know that is limiting to some people but you don't want to take it off a steep drop just like behind me here there's a cliff because it uses the visual positioning system at the bottom it doesn't use GPS this is actually very accurate but if there's a big drop off all of a sudden it could confuse the Drone you don't want to fly it over water and you don't want to fly it over surfaces that don't have a lot of texture like if you're on a completely white painted floor it could confuse the sensors at the bottom but this can be flown indoors as well so yeah but yeah let's go ahead here we'll take a look at some of these features we just looked at hover hover when you launch it is going to automatically find you and no matter where you move around the Drone is going to keep pointing at you the next one here is zoom out and let's change the parameters zoom out nine meters zoom out so I've just set it to nine meters so let's go ahead and we'll see what that looks like I'm going to record on this camera too so again all we have to do is press the button drone will fire up [Music] and it's going to do its maneuver and then come back so it did its thing now it's on its way back just like that put our hand under it and it lands the video is going to be recorded to the internal memory in the Drone I do believe it's 32 gigabytes of memory but by the time the system information is there I think you've got about 22 gigabytes of workable space so let's try the next mode here and this is follow Now by default it's going to follow you from behind [Music] so now it's going to follow me so I'm going to go for a walk I'm probably going to go at a frame of this camera but I'll show you the video from the Drone itself and I'll still have the audio so we can talk so I can just walk now and it's just going to follow along behind me now I'm going to go this way and it should turn and continue to follow me again you do have to be careful because there is no obstacle avoidance so it's just going to follow the path that you're taking and even if it does happen to hit something I don't think it would really do too much damage just because it is so small and Light now when you're done again put your hand underneath it and it will just land now with the follow feature you can actually switch it to what's called Dolly mode and I've actually set that up on the extra they have an extra custom mode there and I've set it up on that so we'll test that out here in a minute as well so let's go to the next one this is orbit and I have to be careful here because I don't want it to orbit over the cliff [Music] but let's uh so so I have it set to 1.5 meters so that's how far it'll be away from us but it looks like it's going over the cliff hopefully it doesn't uh go crazy nope there it is and it's uh it's pretty close to hitting the camera but it uh it actually went up as soon as it detected it underneath it it actually raised in height so as you can see there it just orbited and then it came back and voila so the next one here is called bird's eye and uh let's uh see what we have it set to for height [Music] so I've just set it to the maximum height 15 meters so let's go ahead and we'll give that a shot it's not too windy today so it should be fine [Music] so with bird eye it's just gonna go straight up and then it's going to take a shot down so let's see what it does here now it kind of hesitated there for a minute but yeah there it is it's now at bird's eye now you can hear it it's coming back down so what an impressive little piece of tech so we're gonna do a test with the hover and see how well it follows me on my e-bike as mentioned this can follow up to 20 kilometers an hour so I'll make sure I keep keep the bike less than that and there is a breeze I don't know you can see the um weeds that are moving but uh I don't know if that's going to be too strong for this I don't I'm not quite sure what the wind speed is today but we will give it a give it a try so I just put it in standard follow mode first we'll try that and then we're going to try Dolly with it in front of us but yeah so let's get the Drone up here let's press on the button [Music] there it is there it's pointed at us [Applause] so I'm doing about 11 mile an hour so I'm not quite sure what that translates into uh two kilometers I better stay more in the middle so it doesn't run into one of the bushes on the side there I can still hear it behind me so I know it's still following me [Applause] so yeah seems to be doing okay I think the wind is blowing it around a little bit it is fairly Breezy out I think it's um maybe perhaps a little windier than what it's designed to fly in but yeah that's actually pretty cool let's see what happens when I turn around so it just came to a stop see if it can uh take a turn and yeah still behind me I can hear it so yeah that's pretty cool so I'm going to land it and then we're going to put it into the dolly mode so let's uh put it to Dolly mode I added that to the custom option [Music] okay it is in front of us now so again I'll keep it around 10 miles an hour stay in the center of the road and I think with this little drone you gotta have your movement smooth like you can start speeding up once it's flying but uh boy that thing's like all over the place it's pretty windy but still flying still flying in front of us but I think we're at the threshold of what it's designed for in the Wind but yeah that's actually pretty cool because how inconspicuous is that if you want to get some interesting shots you know you don't want to put a full grown up this thing actually works pretty good now one thing I haven't figured out is how to make it come back to me when it's in this dolly mode every time I walk towards it to put my hand under it it just flies away from me but uh yeah that's actually pretty cool let's confuse it a little bit see what it does whoa didn't like that but I think that's a whip Gus it's actually pretty windy I should probably stop before I oh there's a helicopter up there I better land this thing could take it down and if you've seen that that's a quick way to uh disengage it you can just grab it and then flip it over so yeah that actually worked pretty well I don't know what the footage is going to look like because it was all over the place as you can see it's pretty windy I think I'm beyond the threshold of what it's designed for um it was a little bit calmer today I should have done this test earlier but it is what it is now this drone is capable of recording at 2.7 K and you can also record at 1080 at 60 frames per second so you know that's not too bad and the video quality is pretty good for such a small little drone now within the app you can fly it manually but this drone isn't really designed to fly like that it gives you a few basic commands and that would come in handy if you just want to get some nice reveal shots or something like that but yeah I think for some people this could be a really powerful tool as mentioned if you're a vlogger you're creating social media content things like Tick Tock Instagram reels you could probably do a lot of really interesting things with it and it's just so quick and simple to deploy so again this isn't going to be for everybody if you're a mavic flyer you like to capture aerial content something like this is going to be of no interest to you now if you follow my channel you know I've been doing some vlogging this summer and I think for me I'm going to be able to make good use of it just to get some interesting b-roll add a different element different shots different angles and yeah I'm gonna have some fun with it now right now it's a Kickstarter campaign on Indigo so I will include the link to it I do believe they are shipping now so you don't have to worry about waiting too long I'm not sure what the ship times are but you can order it I did read that they started shipping in July so you're good to go well folks that's basically it for this video hopefully you enjoyed it and got some value give it a thumbs up if you did it's always greatly appreciated and we'll see you in the next one
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Channel: Air Photography
Views: 170,775
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Hover X1 Pocket-Sized Self-Flying Camera, Review, Hover Drone, Hover X1 Review, Features, Specs, Manual Flight, Hover X1 Drone, Hover Drone Revew, Hover Air, Hover Air X1
Id: CsAKfd7ZWtc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)
Published: Tue Aug 15 2023
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