Hey everyone!
Mike here, I'm a filmmaker at Moment & been flying drones forever, way back to the original phantom days where you had to strap a GoPro on with a 3rd party eBay gimbal haha.
Nice to see a conversation going about filters & drones here. It's fun & insightful to read through and see what people are using their drones for and the things they do and don't like about filters.
I think the question of Variable ND vs Fixed goes back soooo long now. Even shooting on DSLRs 10 years ago, until today. I think there will always be proponents on either side. If you want the absolute perfect best picture quality fixed ND is the way to go if you want to get as close as possible to that, but make life a little easier than Variable ND is the way to go. Variable ND's have always been a bit of a pain point from introducing color casts & vignetting but I will say, man, in recent years they've gotten a lot better. I think hard stops on Variable NDs & having two different ranges have helped a TON with some of these issues. That being said, with fixed you'll probably still get a better image, just at the detriment of time and having to carry the extra filters to swap to.
When DJI launched the
Mavic Air 2, the Fly More Combo they released had fixed ND filters included, so we opted to take the angle of a more unique offering and just create Variable ND & CPL filters for it. I played with them myself and was amazed at how easy they were to use for shooting video at the appropriate shutter speeds and took some great panoramas & 48-megapixel stills with the CPL attached.
In regards to other brands, I'm not going to come out and say we're better than anyone else, I'll leave that up to each person to decide. But what I will say is that we're listening to you guys, learning from what people want, and trying as hard as we can to put out products that we're proud of.
Stoked to continue the conversation here, or on a Zoom call with you guys, or even if you just want to drop me an email at
[email protected]