Project Vertex introduced at the DJI Zenmuse X7 event in Hollywood, CA

At the end of last night’s Zenmuse X7 event, DJI gave us a sneak preview of what’s to come. It is special DJI software and it is called DJI’s Project Vertex. Where the Zenmuse X7 with the new prime lenses and CineCore 2.1 is supposed to make post-production easier in filmmaking, Project Vertex will make the pre-production process a lot easier by allowing you to model and pre-program your drone flightpath.

How will DJI’s Project Vertex benefit you?

DJI’s creative director of Europe explained it as follows. Imagine you are the film director and you are scouting a location. You bring your camera to take some stills, You come home and look at the photos and then you think about flight paths. After a few days, you go back and meet with the drone crew. You try to maximize your time, get the shots and go back home to review the footage. Unfortunately, they are not what you had in mind. This is not a pleasant experience and this actually happens a lot.

We at DJI thought about how we can improve this experience with our technology? 

Instead of taking all the equipment to the location, you’d just take a drone. Maybe just a Phantom. And then you do an automatic ‘sight-tour’. It flies and scans the area and then you upload the images to special DJI software to generate a 3D model of the location. So, at your office, you are now able to see the location in 3D with all the details, mountains, trees, roads. Now you can start and plan your shots. You can script, change the focal length and work on your camera movements. You can insert moving subjects such people and cars to visualize what you are planning to see during the actual shoot.

And now comes the cool part. 

When you are satisfied with what you have you can export the file and upload it to the drone so when you are on the set you can completely replicate what you built and created on the computer. This removes all the guesswork and trying. The drone will fly automatically exactly the flight path and get exactly the shots you wanted. This reduces a lot of time, manpower and money in future productions and we will call this Project Vertex.

No words on when DJI will make this software available but it may not be long as they said that:

The future is not far off and you can demo this software today.

Pretty exciting stuff, we think. Let us know in the comments below what you think about DJI’s Project Vertex and how it may help you in your next project.