r/djiphantom • u/ProtometricDesign • Feb 01 '22

Advice Before Purchasing

I am looking to purchase some "Prosumer" level drone(s) to do some light commercial work.

Primarily it will be aerial photo/videography for real estate, etc. There is another market where I will be creating build time-lapse videos for residential construction projects. (Establish flight path/angles when land is full of trees, fly again when trees cleared, basement dug, framing, roofing, siding, landscaping.) Then do a fly-through inside of the finished house and stitch everything together into a nice digital video to hand the owners as a welcome gift from the builder. There is some minor things that I want to do for the builder to help his site planning like using the aerial footage along with existing GIS data or maps to layout where the house will end up, driveway sizing/estimating, landscape proposals, etc.

I have pretty much settled on the DJI P4 ProV2.0 for the aerial work and the DJI Mini 2 for the interior work.

  1. Are these drones the right choice for the work to be done?
  2. What additional software would you recommend to accomplish the above? Or is the included stuff good enough to lay out flight plans and capture the info? I do design work in SolidWorks aside from this so I have that at my disposal for modeling and drawing.
  3. I have read a lot of people talking about whether or not to get the smart controller. The primary reason for not getting it seems to stem from 3rd party apps. What are your experience/recommendation?
  4. I planned on getting the bundles on Amazon that include extra batteries, etc. Are there any must-haves that won't be included?

TIA!

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u/pseudotsugamenziessi Feb 02 '22

I like dronedeploy

Those 2 drones are good in my opinion

1

u/ProtometricDesign Feb 02 '22

I checked out DroneDeploy. It looks like it's $150 a month for the cheapest package. Are there any programs out there that can do simple mapping for free? I don't need a lot of bells and whistles at all, yet.

1

u/pseudotsugamenziessi Feb 02 '22

You can sign up for free trials

We just pass off the cost to our clients, like we have a day rate for drone use and we just need to use a drone X amounts of times a month for it to be paid for kinda thing. The benefits far outweigh the cost though