Cinelifter
Also known as: heavy lift FPV, cinema lift drone
A large FPV drone built to carry a full sized cinema camera, combining aggressive flying with the image quality of a proper body.
Updated
What it means
A cinelifter is the answer to a specific limitation. Small FPV aircraft fly beautifully and carry a tiny camera, while a cinema camera produces the image and cannot be flown that way.
The solution is brute force: a much larger airframe with the thrust to lift several kilograms, flown manually in the same style as a Freestyle FPV quad but carrying real optics.
What it buys is the combination nothing else offers. Chase shots through gaps at speed, recorded with the Dynamic range and depth of a camera that would normally sit on a tripod.
How it works in practice
It is a crewed operation rather than a solo one. A pilot flies, a spotter watches, and frequently a third person operates the camera, which makes it a planned shoot rather than an opportunistic one.
Shot planning matters correspondingly more. Flight time is short, the setup is slow, and each pass has to be worth the effort of getting the aircraft into the air.
Matching its footage to the rest of a session needs a colour plan, since a cinema camera and a mounted action body are far apart and Color matching has real work to do.
What to watch out for
The risk is entirely different from a small quad. Several kilograms flying at speed is dangerous to people and expensive to crash, which constrains where it can legitimately be used.
Regulation treats it differently too, as weight thresholds change what is permitted, so a Sub-250 g drone and a cinelifter are not governed by the same rules at all.
Its footage can also overwhelm a sequence. A cinematic chase cut against mounted camera clips makes everything else look like a different production, which is a Color grading problem as much as an editorial one.
How RawClip handles it
Clips from larger cameras are analysed the same way as action footage, and their steadier framing tends to score well as the stronger shots in a sequence. The colour gap to mounted bodies is reconciled during assembly rather than left visible at every cut between the two.