so ive been shooting commercial stuff with my Inspire 1 for like 6 years now and honestly it still gets the job done for a lot of jobs but im starting to lose clients to guys with newer setups and the image quality gap is getting harder to ignore especially when people are delivering in 8K now

been looking hard at the Inspire 3 and the full frame sensor thing with the Zenmuse X9-8K is obviously the big draw but i'm also thinking about the obstacle avoidance and the whole dual operator setup which i've always done anyway so that part's not new to me

the main thing i want to know is whether people are actually finding the raw video workflow manageable because last i heard the files are absolutely massive and if youre on a tight turnaround with a client breathing down your neck that could be a real problem depending on your post setup

also if anyone's used the Inspire 3 with third party payloads or anything other than the standard X9 cameras i'd love to hear about that because one of my clients keeps asking about thermal and i dunno how realistic that is on this platform

made that jump about 18 months ago and honestly the hardest part was justifying the cost to myself not the workflow. the raw files are big yeah but if youre already set up for proper cinema post you probably have the storage pipeline sorted. we're running a couple of fast NAS units and proxies in Resolve and it's fine, a bit more babysitting than before but nothing crazy

the image quality difference is not subtle by the way. the first time i put X9 footage next to old X3 or even X5S footage on a proper monitor i actually felt a little embarrassed about some stuff i'd delivered. clients havent complained obviously but you can see it

the obstacle avoidance is genuinely useful in complex environments but i still wouldn't trust it completely in a tight space, that's just me being paranoid probably. the real upgrade for me was the low light performance, we do a lot of dusk and night adjacent stuff and the Inspire 3 handles it in a way the 1 just couldn't touch

thermal on the Inspire 3 is not really a thing officially, DJI doesn't have a thermal Zenmuse for it and the third party integration story is pretty thin right now. if thermal is a real requirement you're probably looking at a different platform, some people are doing interesting stuff with custom mounts but that's a whole other level of hassle and cert implications depending on where you fly

for straight cinema work though the I3 is hard to argue with if the budget is there