The main problem with amateur film making is that no one is handing out million dollar checks to fund your latest art house masterpiece, meaning that your choice of shots is basically limited to what you can accomplish with a Handycam and a homemade fig rig. Aerial photography can be especially tricky, as renting a plane, helicopter, or crane to shoot those dramatic establishing shots is prohibitively expensive on a shoe-string budget -- so Draganfly Innovations has come to the rescue with an R/C helicopter for the everyman cinematographer. At $2,500, the company's Stabilized Aerial Video System (SAVS) is still no bargain, but it does give you everything you need for overhead filming in one pre-assembled package: gyroscopically-stabilized copter, anti-vibration video camera, and wireless video receiver from Diversity. Most appealing about this solution is the so-called Thermal Intelligence self-leveling feature, wherein on-board infrared sensors use temperature differences to distinguish the sky from the ground and allow the helicopter to automatically hover without any input from the controller. The 19-ounce Draganfly SAVS is portable enough for almost any application, but the trade-off here is battery life: the relatively tiny lithium-polymer batteries only allow a maximum 15-minute flight.

With movie studios sending around an increasing amount of digital footage before a film is even released, there are a growing number of opportunities for pirates to get their hands on that valuable content and do what pirates do best. We've already seen Dolby Laboratories subsidiary Cinea attempt to combat this problem by shipping secure DVDs and players to Academy Awards judges, and now the company has released a portable USB 2.0 video key called the SV510 that brings the same encryption technology to the dailies and rough cuts that need to be distributed throughout the filmmaking process. Once the desired footage has been encoded with Cinea's S-VIEW encryption and watermarking technique, it can be safely sent on a DVD or via the Internet to recipients with an authorized SV510, who must plug the device into their PCs and enter a six to twelve digit code if they wish to view the content. This system ensures that even if a laptop and SV510 are both lost/stolen together, the encrypted video cannot be viewed without a password; and for heightened security, any of the Cinea peripherals can be remotely de-authorized by the content creators. The Windows version of this product is available immediately for $600 -- a Mac edition will be shipping in October -- along with a "management fee" of $20/month for the life of the device.

[Via über gizmo]