Following our very successful Kickstarter Campaign, many aerial filming drones with auto-follow features have popped up all over the Internet. Being part of a growing market with potentially many other players is both exciting and challenging, and to that extent it’s rather a good thing. Though our focus has been the same from the start—offering an easy way to capture perfect aerial footage on one’s own—we feel from all questions we received that there’s some confusion from our community and audience that we need to share our vision once again.
HEXO+ is the brainchild of people who love outdoors and bringing back good, beautiful memories. So we created a product that reflects our needs. We’ve always developed and thought of HEXO+ as a camera for outdoors and action sport enthusiasts but that will eventually be used in other contexts. What this means though, is that it’s tremendously important for HEXO+ to be practical, robust and adapted to challenging conditions.
But it’s not only ours by any means. With the sheer amount of online/IRL discussions with the HEXO+ community over the past year, we’ve gotten tons of input and the confirmation you guys wanted just the same thing as what we were aiming for:
– High-quality footage
Instead of having our own build-in camera, we’ve opted for a better set-up: taking the best action camera of the market (GoPro) and combining it with a 3-axis gimbal to deliver smooth stabilized footage. From what our field testing has showed us, digital stabilization is satisfactory aesthetically speaking and alters the footage. Nowhere near the quality we were looking for—nature is beautiful and no one would want to get footage of astonishing landscape or cool action that look low-res and shaky. Using a GoPro also means you can easily upgrade your camera.
– Speed and stability
Since quality footage is not defined solely by the pixel count, we opted from the start for a 6-propellers design, for more stability and speed. As you might have noticed, many outdoor activities involve moving relatively fast so being functional at speeds up to 40mph is a no-brainer if you want to cover things like snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, etc.
– Unlimited creative options
From early on we realized the potential of being able to autonomously fly an aerial camera the way we wanted. Following the subject is pretty neat of course, but we want a tool that’s giving you proper creative control to tell the stories you want to share. Our library of camera movements is a whole production crew in your pocket, packed in an intuitive interface—we know how many of you care for beautiful images and footage and HEXO+ will be all about this: a creative tool giving you control.
– Flight time
Let us be straightforward about one thing: flying an aerial camera for hours is technology that’s not for tomorrow. What we focused on is the ease of swapping batteries, because that’s what will give you the flight time you need. Built in batteries means a charge cycle between every use and degraded performances in the long run, so we thought twice and went the easy replacement way.
To sum it up, we want our product to be very functional and deliver something that matches our expectations from the start as well as yours. We are creating something that will help you capture your best moments rather than just being a gadget you’ll be using just once. That has been our motivation since day one and still is. We understand people get excited every time a new toy is being announced with its accompanying promesses. Our goal has always been and remain to provide you with the best product so you can capture your life with new angles for unlimited storytelling possibilities.
Your dedicated HEXO+ team