Tag: Drone Flights

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” →

RC Test Flight

The next flight was to be yet another test flight, this time to try out my new DJI remote controller for Tinker Bell. As I hoped, range is much improved, however it is still strictly line of sight only. I wonder if the larger drones have the actual control circuit on a different frequency, e.g. similar to remote-controlled airplanes, to achieve better control and range.

Anyway, this requirement for having line-of-sight with the drone at all times will require future flights to be carefully planned, and require more editing of the videos, to cut out times when the drone was stationery awaiting me to get to a new vantage point, in order to maintain line-of-sight for the next planned leg of the flight.

Edited on iMovie, initially on my iPad, then handed over to my MacBook Pro. To my surprise, the handing over of the project from one device to the other went reasonably smoothly, only minor edits were needed afterwards. Since this was only a test flight, editing was very light, and the flight is pretty much presented as flown…

One other thing I noticed about the remote control is that while the range is much improved, the video feed not necessarily so. I wonder if this is due to the fact that the remote only works with my iPhone, but not my iPad. My iPhone is quite an old model, with limited memory and processor power, so it may just not be able to stream a high-quality video stream in real-time. At some point I will have to look into this and investigate further.

St Thomas Aquinas Parish Church

The next flight was the first one not done entirely to check out the drone, and practice piloting. It is my strong belief that the visually most interesting objects for drone flights should have a strongly three-dimensional character. This way, the drone’s ability to explore these objects in three dimensions leads to a viewer experience that cannot be replicated by any other means. If the object can be fully covered by just walking along it, what is the point of unleashing a drone in the first place…?

With this view in mind, I nearly instantly had my eyes on St Thomas Aquinas Parish Church in Mangaldan, by far the highest building in the area, and with a nice open area in front of it which directly borders the public park.

I used Hover to confirm that I was not in a No-Fly Zone. There were no immediately obvious “Don’t Fly Drones” signs, and the place was reasonably empty. As for the Parish itself, there was nobody obvious around I could have asked for permission, and given that Filipinos are usually quite open to new technology, I hoped that nobody would take offence and launched Tinkerbell…

Control was still with my iPad, so I continued to be limited by its range, and some of the jerking towards the end of the video is caused by temporary loss of control to the drone. Recovery of the drone was by gesture control, which worked surprisingly well.

Edited in iMovie on my iPad.