Category: Vimeo Videos

Thor’s Stone

After a lengthy hiatus, Tinks finally went on another outing, this time Thor’s Stone in Thurstaston Common. After the debacle at Brough Castle, I decided to give up on filming landmarks, and instead concentrate on publicly accessible landscapes, where the legality of each flight is without question.

Thor’s Stone is a Tor, a bedrock buried under ice during the last Ice Age, and then formed by thousands of years of ice slowly scraping along it, giving it its unique form. Since Thor’s Stone is made of sandstone ― a relatively soft type of rock ― subsequent erosion by wind and rain have further deepened the unique shape created by the ice, more so than would be the case by Tors made from granite, which are the more common type near home in Ireland.

The origin of the name remains a mystery. People have speculated that it was given to the rock by Vikings, who used it for worshipping or even sacrifices in the 9th century AD, in the run up to the Battle of Brunanburh, or just after it. Local legend has it that the red colour is due to the blood that run down the rock from the excessive sacrifices of animals and humans. The location of the battlefield remains unknown, but some historians believe that it was near modern-day Bromborough.

Either way, there is no historic evidence that the Vikings worshipped, or even ever ventured to Thor’s Stone. The colour of the Tor is of course just the natural red colour of sandstone, and no staining of blood would have perceivably survived well over thousand years of exposure to the elements. It is however the kind of place that Vikings are known to have favoured as ‘sacred’ elsewhere, so the legend is not without some merit. After all, it is the only reasonable explanation for the Tor’s name that anyone has come up with so far…

The movie is a result of a single-battery pass, flown with the usual combination of my remote control and this time my new iPhone X. In-flight video transmission was somewhat smoother than with my older iPhone SE, but still far from perfect, suggesting that at least some of my problems are down to range limitation of the relatively small antennas of the Spark’s remote control. This has made me even less inclined to upgrade to the Maverick drone, as the latter uses the same remote control. I think that Tinks will do just fine for the little bit of hobby flying that I do.

Apparently, registration for drone owners comes into effect on 30 November 2019, with registrations opening on 01 October, so this would have been most likely the last unregistered flight of Tinks.

Flight planning was carried out with Airmap, and post editing again with iMovie. I briefly tried Unfold, but it turned out to be less of a video editing tool, but more of a slideshow tool, optimised for mobiles. I did like Unfold a lot, but felt that it was the wrong tool on this occasion.

Annoyingly, I have forgotten the URL of the website I use for royalty-free music and had to find a new one, on this occasion Bensound. The name of the song is Epic, and Bensound does not reveal the artists.

Liverpool Castle

Tinks’ next adventure was to be Rivington Castle near Horwich.  The structure is actually a folly, built in the early 20th century as a scale replica of Liverpool Castle.  The latter was a medieval defensive castle on the site where today Victoria Monument stands, and was demolished in 1726 to make space initially for St George’s Church, which in turn was later demolished in favour of the monument.

The scale replica was commenced in 1912 based on conjectural plans drawn by E. W. Cox in 1892 ― more than 100 years after the castle had been demolished ― and has also never been completed.  We therefore ended up with an incomplete scale replica of the ruins of a medieval castle based on best-guess plans.  The scale of the replica is not actually known, but close to 1:1.  The main reason we know that the replica is not to scale is the fact that there would not have been enough space inside the walls for archers to draw their bows.

Flight preparations with AirMap, video post-processing with iMovie on my MacBook Pro. The place is open to the public, and there only was one couple present who were walking their dog. Having learned from the Brough Castle incident, I asked them whether they would mind if I was flying Tinks, and they had no objections.

Tales from Cheshire

Tinker Bell’s next adventure was to take place in Chester‘s Roman amphitheatre ― what’s left of it anyway. On this occasion I was not there on my own, but with a colleague who I did not want to keep waiting for too long. Also, while I had the amphitheatre to myself when launching Tinks, she very quickly attracted the attention of quite a few children. Starting to fear that they may not keep their distance when I was going to bring Tinks in for landing, I terminated the flight early while there was still open space for me to manoeuvre.

As a result I had only a very limited amount of footage on this occasion. In the beginning, I was not even going to bother to edit it in any form or shape, but then I decided to try out iMovie’s Trailer function.
The end result is very similar to Quik, but the editing process is very different. The trailer is a template, with placeholder clips that suit the music ― unlike Quik, the score is predetermined and cannot be edited, neither can the sequence of clips. The text slides can be customised to an extent.
So, it does address one of my misgivings about Quik, in that this time I am in complete control with respect to which clips are used. Unfortunately, the tool to select the clips is rather crude, and therefore somewhat frustrating to use.
Also, Quik allows creational freedom in other ways that iMovie Trailer restricts, most notably free choice of the soundtrack. In balance, I think that I still prefer Quik ― the trailer looks at first glance very impressive, but ultimately has very little substance (which helped on this occasion given my severe lack of raw material…).

Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse ― The Quik Edits

As threatened last week, I have now sent the Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse videos through Quik, and the results can be seen below.

Leasowe Castle Quik version

Leasowe Lighthouse Quik version

The initial results were not that great.  I had to go back into iMovie and do a lot of pre-editing to make sure that Quik was actually concentrating on the actual subjects of each video, i.e. the castle and the lighthouse.  There can be no doubt that we have not yet reached the point where Quik’s AI understands the context of the video.  Instead, it clearly focusses on parts of the video that show rapid change, presumably because they are likely to be more visually stimulating, and Quik was clearly written for GoPro cameras and athletes trying to achieve death-defying stunts.

That is all fair and square, but for that reason I do not understand why GoPro does not allow more human interaction during the editing process.  Surely, it is not all that technically challenging to allow users to ‘highlight’ one way or another what they think are the key moments of the video, and for Quik to then work around that…?

However, once I had edited the videos to the point where Quik had no choice but to show the parts that I wanted shown, I am very impressed with the result.  Grudgingly, I have to admit that I think the final Quik edit is actually better than my edits.  Part of that is of course that Quik is absolutely ruthless in cutting away anything not crucial to the movie, while I of course will always have the tendency to show all the footage I have taken.

I was contemplating to put a poll here to see what other people think about which is the better version of each video, but I think I know the outcome, and I will not like it, so decided to do away with it…

On a marginally related note, there were also quite a few technical difficulties to import the movies into Quik, which I will explain below for those with a wish to experiment with it themselves…

Continue reading “Leasowe Castle & Lighthouse ― The Quik Edits” →

Leasowe Lighthouse

By mere chance I stumbled across Leasowe Lighthouse while searching on Trip Advisor for restaurants within walking distance of Leasowe Castle ― spoiler alert:  There aren’t any…  The lighthouse is also briefly visible in the distance on Tinks’ flight over Leasowe Castle, from minutes 1:26 to 1:32.  Listed as Europe’s oldest brick-built lighthouse, I immediately knew that I had to unleash Tinker Bell on it…

Built in 1763, the lighthouse was in use until 1908 ― unlike the Lower Leasowe Light, that was also built in 1763 closer to the shore, but destroyed by the sea soon afterwards.  Historic records while ambiguous would suggest that the initial reflector installed was a parabolic mirror, which would make it the first reflector of that kind to ever have been installed in a lighthouse.

When it was closed in 1908, records indicate that the lighthouse keeper at the time was a Mrs Williams, which makes it the only lighthouse at the time known to have been occupied by a female keeper.  After becoming a tea room of all things for a while, it was vacant for an unknown length of time before becoming the base for the ranger service of the North Wirral Coastal Park in 1989.   It contains an exhibition for the ranger service, and is occasionally open to the public, though my understanding is that nothing of the original fittings as a lighthouse has survived.

Postprocessing was the same as with Tinks’ flight over Leasowe Castle.

As a side note, Tinks was not alone on this flight.  Only seconds after I launched her, a couple launched a DJI Phantom from the nearby parking lot.  For a moment I was contemplating to abandon the flight, especially since I was not sure that the other pilot had seen Tinks.  However, the other pilot did not seem to want to film anything in particular, and was flying over the meadows and the beach, so I decided that the risk of continuing with the flight was probably low as I was concentrating on the lighthouse.   The other drone is briefly visible in the video around 2:00, overflying the parking lot.

After I completed my flight I walked over and watched the girl land her drone while her boyfriend / fiance / husband had to hold down their dog to prevent it from going ‘fetch’ on it.  We had a quick chat afterwards.  Her Phantom was purchased second hand, and it would appear that she was flying it merely for the sensation of flying it, rather than for any specific purpose, and was not keeping any records of her flights…

Drone flying is certainly becoming more popular, and a while back two drones being launched independently of each other in the same place by mere chance would have been a really rare occurrence…

Leasowe Castle

Next, Tinker Bell stayed at Leasowe Castle Hotel. Not her choice, but rather the place was booked for me by my company. It is a really nice hotel, but it is also in the middle of nowhere, and thus was not ideal for the purpose.

However, since I was staying here anyway, I asked the concierge on Tinker Bell’s behalf whether she could do a fly-by of the hotel. The concierge had no objections, Air Map gave me the thumbs up, and off she went.

Interestingly, even though Air Map gave me a thumbs up, Tinker Bell complained about being in a Category D Zone. I checked on Sky Vector after the flight and indeed we were in a Category D Zone, but only from FL15 upwards ― so for a drone only in reach if the safety limits are switched off, and Tinker Bell’s were not. Clearly, the built-in safety mechanism does not take Flight Levels into account ― bearing on the safe side, I guess, but still a bit annoying…

Anyway, Leasowe Castle was built in the 16th century, and in spite of my misgivings about its isolated location, I have to admit that it is very picturesque. Virtually nothing is known about the original castle, not even who built it with any degree of certainty, or why ― there is nothing here really that needs protecting ― but eventually it became a family home, a home for railway workers, and finally a hotel.

Video edited on iMovie using my MacBook Pro.  For the first time I used the time lapse facility of iMovie to make the movie more concise.  This is not a BBC documentation after all…  I did consider sending the video through Quik for further compression, and at some point may still do so, if nothing else but to satisfy my curiosity what Quik will do with it…

San Fabian Public Beach

Tinker Bell‘s next flight was to be on San Fabian Public Beach. It was really yet another test flight, since my personal belief is that a drone only really comes into its own when exploring three-dimensional objects, yet a beach is about as two-dimensional as it gets….

Nevertheless, the mountains around Baguio provided a great backdrop, and the drone rising up over the beach gives a sense of scale, and an idea why I like Philippine beaches so much: Their scale, and the fact that they are not all sold out to resort hotels. I am vastly opposed to mass-tourism, and will never understand while people travel half-way around the planet to be in a place that is deliberately isolated from the local culture, to be with people from their own country, and eat and drink the same foodstuff as at home…

As you can see, I still used the iPad as a controller for this flight, and it’s limited range limited what I could do with Tinker Bell on this occasion. The movie was edited on iMovie on my iPad.

The flight also quite undeniably shows another danger of drone flights. Tinker Bell shows the increasingly desperate state of my cranial hair in a much more blunt and brutal way than any selfie ever could…

Tinker Bell’s First Flight ― The Sunken Garden in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

After lengthy debate, and investigating a lot of potential sites, we finally decided on the Sunken Garden in Quezon City as the site for the first flight.  While it was unlikely to provide the most stunning of visuals, our thought was that Tinker Bell would be easy to retrieve if she crashed, and that there was relatively limited prospect of causing serious damage in case of pilot error.

The flight was successful, but we instantly learned the first lesson:  Do not take off if there is an overhead obstruction, as otherwise the drone will struggle to return to the landing site ― as it is programmed to do ― if it loses connection to the controlling device.

This flight predates the purchase of my remote control, so I used the DJI GO 4 App on my iPad to control Tinker Bell.  The controls worked fine, but it was also instantly clear that the range of the iPad of about 50 m was not even remotely adequate for my intended purposes, and a remote control was purchased shortly thereafter…

We used the Hover app to check whether flying a drone in the Sunken Garden was allowed.  I very much liked the functionality of the Hover app, but about half a year later found out that its knowledge of No-Fly Zones is patchy at best, and so I now use SkyVector to determine whether or not I can legally fly Tinker Bell in a given area.

Edited on iMovie on my iPad.