What happens when you put a 1000W LED onto a drone?

Replay: A YouTuber mounted a 1000w LED light onto a Freely Alta drone. Check out the video!

1000w LED lighting rig on a Freefly Alta.

There are many applications for drones, some of them more useful than others, as operators find different ways to attach new devices. One we haven't really seen until now is using a drone as a lighting rig. Why would you want to do this? Who knows, but it is an interesting experiment nonetheless.

This is exactly what a YouTube user by the name of RCTESTFLIGHT set out to achieve. By taking the monster that is a Freely Alta drone and mounting a 1000W LED light to it, some impressive results were achieved.

Using high quality, colour accurate LEDs, it would seem that the result is a very usable, if noisy, lighting system…or you could use a crane. However, the interesting thing about using a drone in this way isn't so much the footage you can get from the drone itself, but the artistic use of moving light as seen from the ground.

As for the practical use of such a rig, I'll leave that up to others to decide. At only 10 minutes flight time with this type of payload, it is certainly limited. But if anything, it goes to show how far LED lighting has come along and what can be achieved with a DIY lighting rig. That it is light enough to be carried on a drone should give low/no budget producers hope yet!

Thanks to The Verge for bringing this to our attention. Watch the video below and let us know what you think in the comments.