This one is a camera that flies itself. You hold the HoverAir X1 out, let go, and it lifts off your hand, films you, and — when you’re done — lands back in your palm. No controller, no sticks. I wanted to test two things: how hard it actually is to use, and how easily drone footage drops into the AI editing setup we’ve been building over these experiments.
Thirty-second version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ2IYs9aEsw
Shooting with it
The honest headline: it’s almost too easy. You pick a mode — I mostly used “Follow” — let go, and walk. It held the follow down an open country lane, and then, more impressively, through the whole garden: weaving between the raised beds, around the plants, past the pea frames, without me touching a thing. The shots that used to need a second person holding a camera, it just does on its own. There’s a row of automated modes beyond Follow too — Orbit, Zoom-Out, Bird’s Eye — that frame proper cinematic moves hands-free.
Is it worth it? The honest version
A few things worth knowing before you buy, because the range is wider than people expect. The model I filmed with is the base X1, which records up to 2.7K — perfectly good for a walk-and-talk or a garden tour, but it’s not a cinema camera and it doesn’t pretend to be. If you want the cinematic look, the step-up X1 Pro shoots 4K, and the X1 ProMax goes to 8K with flat 10-bit colour profiles for grading. Across all of them the real trade-offs are the same: short flight time (around ten minutes a battery, which is why the bundles ship with three), a limited live-view range, and obstacle avoidance that’s fine at sensible speeds but not for racing through dense terrain. And a tip the reviewers all repeat: in bright light, add an ND filter and a 180-degree shutter — that’s the difference between “good” and “great” footage.
Bringing it into the edit
This was the part I really wanted to test, and it was a non-event in the best way. The footage comes off the drone as plain MP4 files with no audio at all — which sounds like a problem, but by now the pipeline is built for exactly that: narration, music and titles all get added afterwards. The clips dropped into the same workflow as the phone footage from previous experiments without any special handling. Zero friction.
How this was made
Experiment 11 in an open series documenting how these videos get produced. The new element this round was drone footage as a source. I recorded the narration in a single take; it was auto-transcribed and cut into beats, laid over the HoverAir’s silent Follow footage, with a product card, an AI-generated upbeat music bed, and a full automated QA pass — checking the audio for glitches and every frame for anything identifying — before publishing. Edited with Google Gemini, Whisper, ElevenLabs, Pillow and ffmpeg, orchestrated through Claude Code. The drone did the filming; the rest was assembled for a few pennies of API time.
Rover Planet — fuel your curiosity.
