been looking into payload options for the Inspire 2 for a while now and most of what i find is either old forum posts from 2018 or DJI marketing copy which is useless. specifically wondering about real world use of the X9-8K Air on actual productions, not just test footage uploaded to vimeo

we have a project coming up that the DP wants native anamorphic aerial if we can swing it and the X9 with the DL mount supposedly supports the anamorphic option but ive never actually talked to someone whos done it end to end ? like shot it, brought it into post, dealt with the metadata, all of it. our DIT is asking questions i cant answer yet

also general question ? is there a meaningful flight time penalty using the X9 vs the X7? we'd be shooting in higher altitude locations and im already nervous about battery performance up there

used the X9-8K on two commercial projects last year, one of them had some aerial sequences that ended up in a broadcast documentary. anamorphic workflow is real but you need to be very upfront with post about the desqueeze process because if their pipeline isnt set up for it from the start you will lose time. we had an issue on the first project where proxies were generated without accounting for the 1.6x squeeze factor and the editor spent half a day confused before anyone figured it out

as for flight time, yeah you feel it. i was getting roughly 20-22 minutes in normal conditions with the X7, dropped to maybe 17-18 with the X9 depending on gimbal movement. at altitude that gets worse, we were shooting at around 2800 meters one day and honestly i was treating every battery like it had 15 minutes max just to be safe. its manageable but you need more batteries and tighter shot planning

tangentially related but if you're doing high altitude work with the Inspire have you sorted your compass calibration routine for those locations? we had weird behavior on a mountain shoot that turned out to be interference we werent expecting and it wasnt fun. probably not your main question but worth having a plan for that before you get up there with an X9 hanging off the bottom