so ive been flying freestyle for about two years and i mostly just used whatever caddx or runcam fits in the stack but lately ive been wanting to get actual usable footage out of my 5 inch, not just fpv cam stuff. been looking at the naked gopro route since a full gopro is obviously too heavy and throws off the whole tune but even the naked hero setup adds like 30ish grams in the front which changes things.

the part im really trying to wrap my head around is the stabilization question. i know reelsteady and gyroflow exist and ive messed with gyroflow a little but i feel like without a physical gimbal youre always going to be fighting the props in post and the more aggressive you fly the worse it gets. been looking at some lightweight single axis gimbal options but honestly most of them seem made for cinewhoops not a real 5 inch thats actually throwing itself around.

is there anyone here running a proper payload on a freestyle quad or is this basically just a cinematic build territory thing and im trying to make something work that doesnt

you're kind of trying to have it both ways and thats not necessarily a bad thing but yeah there are tradeoffs. the naked hero with gyroflow is actually really solid if you're not doing super snappy moves, like the stabilization in gyroflow with a good gyro log is genuinely impressive now compared to even two years ago. the issue is more with propwash than anything, no amount of post stabilization fixes that, it just looks bad and thats a tune problem not a camera problem.

single axis gimbals on a 5 inch is kind of a mess in my experience, the vibration from the motors just resonates through everything and the gimbal fights itself. cinewhoops work because theyre already soft and slow, the gimbal doesn't have to deal with rapid attitude changes every half second. if you want both worlds the closest ive seen is people running a full cinewhoop build tuned loose and then treating it like a slower freestyle quad but it never quite feels the same.

honestly just get a seperate dedicated cinematic build if the footage matters to you. trying to make a freestyle 5inch do cinema work is kind of fighting the physics the whole time. i tried it for a while and the footage was ok but i was always compromising either the flying or the image. two different tools