Tag: Tinkerbell

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.

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” →

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.