The starter copters are all infrared. You can get them with cameras. I'll bet the first hit on Amazon will do fine. Yup. First two hits are Syma and they're under $50. Now - a quad that will take a gopro is a whole 'nuther animal. That pretty much puts you in DJI territory. Worthy of note - if you want to fly around and take pretty pictures, you don't need a gopro hauler. If you want to fly around and get actual cinema moves (pan, tilt, zoom as you fly), you're not only into 2-person operation, you're kind of on beyond zebra as far as size and expense. The "I want to slap my existing gopro into an existing quad" market segment is kind of the worst spot in all of quadcopterdom. Get a shitty one to crash into walls, and if you love it, get a real one that won't haul a gopro and learn to fly. I recommend blade because pretty much every local hobby shop will have parts.
http://us.360.tv/en/ I'm waiting to get one of these (if the kickstarter ever comes through) and want to get some pictures over the canyons and in caves around where I am, thus the want for the quadcopter. Though, it sounds like it's not really something you can just pick up and fly, so I might just default back to my old idea of a big helium balloon. Quick edit: do those base model like the blade come with a controller?
http://shop.gopro.com/drones/karma/2016.html Take it from me - without altitude control, balloons rarely go where you want them to.
I wonder why that is. My guess is that most amateur filmmakers would jump on exactly this kind of drone. Are there technical limitations that make a cheap(ish) version of that impossible? I don't know much about this, is adding a 150g gopro to a quad too heavy? Sure, you won't get any camera movement but you got more control than taping your gopro to a kite... Honestly tho, I watch a lot of youtube and 10 minutes drone videos are incredibly boring. I've never made it to the end of a single one. Maybe a 3h compilation over a good playlist to put on at a party would be a different story.The "I want to slap my existing gopro into an existing quad" market segment is kind of the worst spot in all of quadcopterdom.
Because if you have the first inkling of what you're doing, you recognize that a quadcopter gives you x,y,z... and for cinematography, you need x,y,z,P,T,Z,F (pan, tilt, zoom, focus). And if you don't care, you'll still recognize that more than 3/4ths of the weight of a GoPro is in its survivability. You can simplify the hell out of things by going with a lightweight camera built into the drone itself. The majority of the commercial drone work being done right now is realtor shots.