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In-Field Shooting: Advanced Controls

This is our flying tripod getting comfortable with it and knowing its capabilities. Even if from one day class you're not going to be an expert it in any way, shape or form, you know what's possible. And maybe you know, a few little gotchas to look out for. That's really the benefit of this morning is to know the capabilities and specifically right now, the last thing that I want to mention is this idea of different ways of flying your copter rather than just first person, you know, joystick. And there's a few things that, especially in the last few weeks, the D. G. I have added that dramatically extend capabilities of it, which I think are extremely cool, especially for the photographer, where we want to spend less time worrying about the flight and mawr time composing a shot. So with that, there are a few different technologies that I want to mention you already saw in the preferences. I turned on something known as ground Station and had all those scary warnings that if you do this,...

we disavow any knowledge of you. And if you're agents were lost and killed anyway, you guys don't remember mission impossible anyway, once you turn that on and will actually show it on the app that allows you to make what are known as waypoints. And the way point on a map allows you to actually set the course for your copter. Put in points. The's speed can be set globally as slow, medium or fast. The medium one seems to be good for typical video use, and you could actually, if you were just shooting stills, you could make it fast. As long as there's no chance of you running into anything, you can get to some point just so you have more time to shoot the altitude as you put in a point that I want to go from this part of the pork park to this part of the park. At this point of the park, you can change the altitude for each one so you actually can have a variable course. In terms of its height. You can put up to 16 different way points in to create your course so you can make it a smooth as possible. Um, that's up to you. The location on the map and the altitude are going to be set by these waypoints, but you're yaw and pitch the yard looking left and right by actually moving the copter looking left and right, or the pitch looking down is still controlled by you. So you'll notice, I bet a video clip when we was using a yesterday that as I move for one point to another, I'm changing the pitch and looking down as the people are riding their bike below me so you can follow action, and that again is a photographer. I know where I'm gonna be have already thought out the course that set, and literally, I am now controlling the camera, including, normally, as remember from our little you know how, toe fly our drone wherever this is pointing. If I go forward, it's going to go that way. With this waypoint technology, I can actually rotate again. What's known is that yaw. I can rotate it and because of the gyroscope and the GPS lock, if that courses from here to here when I go this way, it's going to continue. It can rotate and look down while it goes in one direction. Normally, it's going to go forward if I'm doing forward So obviously it has to do in a huge amount of calculations to go. Wait a minute. Do No, no, no. Forward. No, wait, wait. So you know, it has to do a huge amount of calculations in order to do this. And of course, with the advent of the gimbal, that means it can do all these rotations and the camera steak staying stable. Awesome. Fantastic. Cool, Groovy. Bitchin. It's a freebie. It's turned on. It's pretty easy to get to, um, has one scary warning. These options, um, which are part of that IOC intelligent orientation control. These can only be turned on by going into the app, and I'll launch that. Now, just so we have that and, uh, these really you basically have to sign your life away. If you want to turn these things on, you have to go there, not you can't even find them. You've got to go into the app, the desktop app that you can get for Windows or Mac download from the D. J. I. And, um, you basically have to go in and say, OK, that particular phantom in the upper right hand corner, I'll show you where it is and on. Then turn on this NASA mode. It even have a scary name for it. The Nazem mode. I think those air the shadow warriors from Lord of the Rings that nasa cool. But they're incredibly powerful and very, very cool. They've actually been around for a while in these hidden controls. This is a brand new future to use in the desktop app similar to what they've had with their IPad app for a while. But these are very unique. And again for a photographer there great to know that air there, this is I would consider advanced. I'm not gonna go into it in detail, But the home lock is basically if this is your home, is you home? Is the con constant? So that is going to be constant mean if I go forward on the control forward is always gonna be away from me back is always going to be toward me no matter which way I'm going. So if I move my orientation, start going this way, that's gonna be forward. Even though normally if I was using my controller normally if I wanted to go this way right, I would be coming over here and moving this this way In this case, I can point over whatever direction I'd like using this rotated. And this forward is not gonna be this way. If I'm pointing this way forward will be this way back will always be home no matter which way I'm looking. In other words, the copter can be looking this way. Not this way. So my position in this kind of grid this two D space here is completely control device on this. This is always gonna be away from me. This will always be back towards me. OK, no matter which way the copter is rotated in here, so I'll put that in both of these. The copter can rotate on its own axis and do whatever its want. It's in terms of my right hand here. It's always gonna be based upon this. The cool thing about that, if this is always away from a and back toward me, what is left and right, left and right is now not just left and right globally left and right means OK, if I'm 300 feet away, I'm gonna stay through interviewed away. I'm gonna do a nice curving arch. So now you can go left over here and be out through inter feet and all of a sudden, now you're getting this wonderful curvature around whatever your environment is, which is very difficult to do. Obviously that's a very complicated thing. And if you're shooting video and also you're trying to tilt down at the same time as you're looking down now you've got a smooth arch with the potential of a pitch down while you're shooting very, very complex Move. This is the home lock. The home lock is oriented. It's these basically this, remember, is your GPS these right Here are your special modes the home lock the home Like I'm gonna go with the, um, home lock is all the way down. And so all the way down. Once you've instigated this option by basically hooking up your camera to your desktop app, turning it on, signing your life away this down is going to give you that potential for a home lock scenario in the center is gonna be course lock. Okay, The top is remember the default settings that you want to always have. The center is course lock and course log is different from home. Lock in sense that whatever your if this is my home situation here and I'm pointing this my initial direction is setting up now. My global left right up and down. It now becomes global. Once I start that meaning that no matter which way I'm oriented and again, we'll use that same scenario that remember the camera wherever your drone is can rotate anyway, that it would like wherever it is on this grid. But my forward, back left and right will always be based upon that initial direction. Okay, so you always will know that I'm always going left. Okay, no matter what. Remember left in here that could put the drone anywhere in this situation. And here it's always going to go that way. Even if the camera is pointing this way. All right. Make sense. So if I'm pointing it something, if the sun is over here setting, I can pan go right. And it's always gonna keep that same orientation. Okay? And that goes left, right back and forward. So both of these allow you to know what this is doing either Constant based upon you always coming back towards you in this case, If it's over here and you go back, it's not gonna come back to you. It's just going to come back in that same orientation. Okay, so this is course lock. This is home locked. Both have a great use, this ground station and its way of points. All three of these were available to you. These don't even think about until you're really comfortable. Because obviously, this changes what these do. And you're going to spend that first time really understanding how these work before you, in a sense, break it. This is in a sense, fund. If you're in a you've got, you know, your your environment figured out, then this actually is probably a safer weight toe work than some other ones just because it is actually taking control based upon you looking at a map. So let's just take a look at that right now. Okay, First off, we've got our computer set up here. This right here and I don't have it hooked up, so it's not going toe. Tell me. Excuse me. It's not going to give me an option, but this is the Phantom two AP desktop app that you get from the D G I website and going into this view mode here. This is where you can go into some different options in terms of calibrating the system, which is great. This will let you know again, I'm not connected. Usually I would have a micro USB hooked up to the copter, and it would give me what my current firmware and everything else is great, useful under the actually, in any of these the Phantom here by clicking on that is going to bring up the option of getting into this NASA mode and a Z a, um and with it will come the scary warnings. So that's where you find it. It's in the phantom app, and that's all that I'm gonna do now for legal responsibility. Okay, um but this app and I've done some screenshots. Let's see if I can actually get this to work just so we can show you in real time and I will get our WiFi enabled and speaking to each other. I have turned on first my control even without propellers. Controller WiFi extender DoubleClick. Happy copter. While this is figuring out the, um WiFi questions so far, any questions about those things, Jack. A lot of folks are. So Colin had this question. Do you have any tips on how to fly a circular tracking shot, for example. Around a lighthouse, for example? Yes. That would be con Smyth, would it? I is a Kiwi Collins. Don't think I don't wanna hear out there. Listen, I know, um, that that would be a great case, That home lock if you were standing, You know, if you were at the base of the, uh, lighthouse, that would be a great example of it where you could actually then could send it out, however distance you wanted from that. And then I used that feature just pan left, basically pointing at the lighthouse and pen, and it would continue that circle. The other thing would be with 16 points. You can get a pretty well ah, good circle. Using the same way points. Um, so I'd say that either one of those is, um, gonna be good. Aside from just learning the fact of remember your side to side and your rotation. So, typically, I would say you're just going to run through a ton of drills getting your directional pad your joystick skills down. Maybe using that little app that does a flight simulation. I mean, we talked about, but in terms of capabilities and features that may help augment that either the way point or the home lock. That's their purpose. Yeah. Yes. So on the home lock, let's say, given the lighthouse situation, that was just asked about if you wanted to be up here and shooting down. But you didn't want to be in the picture so that if you're the center, can you be out of the picture? Can you set that center point and be out of ho? I believe you can. I believe you can actually set the home point to be something other than the launch sites of the copter. That is an advanced advanced mode and I wouldn't be able to take. But yes, you can. Almost all of these you can come up like is an example. That course lock. You can change it, go halfway through the flight and change whatever that initial direction is. So you can recalibrate toe what would straight ahead be And same thing with the home lock you can recalibrate. What is this? Centrepoint. But now you're into rocket surgery. You know, I think that's but yes, you can. Good. Good question. Yes. Regarding waypoints. Uh, if you have a particular area that you go to on several different occasions and you've got waypoints set up. But maybe the weather, the wind or something is causing a problem, and you can't do it. Your shoot that day. Is there a way of doing a preset in waypoints? Not as far as I know. Not within the mobile app for the IPhone. If you're going to be using the IPAD base station app, that which allows you to apply out of sight further away needs additional hardware, additional devices. But yes, you can. You can save a zoom, any flight paths as you'd like. You have all sorts of, you know, history and pre planning your flight and all that. So, yes, that's quite elaborate. But that's gonna use again this Bluetooth connection to set up the programming of your flight path and we'll take additional hardware. It's a very good question. I don't believe and get at him. You can that there's There's no way currently of saving a path. And his aides say in Monty Python. A path the path Yes, one more question on the way points. If do they have to be like, Let's say you wanted to do different altitudes at the same point before you went on to the next one? Could you go like here, here and here and then move around or doesn't have to go, But you have to maybe go in a spiral point. After you said it, you couldn't put two points on top of each other because you wanted to lease at a slower to send. You could obviously have it at 11 and then right next to it. Have another one, and it will make that gradual change. You can move the points after the fact and fine tune it so you can move them closer to each other in case you get a little bit carried away and you can't get too close. Um, but that would give you a little pause at each one of these points. There is a bit of a pause, so that's thing. If you want a smooth curvature, it's really not the spine based paths. And so with that, you're going to be boiling point point point, and it does kind of recount Calculate, You know, with each one. It would be nice if it had a certain dampening that would take place as it hit a point that it would have a certain you know. But again, by definition, since you're flying something, you don't want a variable, so they haven't put it in there. It's a point you said from here to here. That's what I'm gonna do. Don't blame me if you know there's a bird in there. Okay. Have we got the feed for? Yes, please figure it out. So drone Blawg would like to know what? Um what weather conditions Can you fly in? How we think that a drone blood would know the crest six. They're probably more knowledgeable than may high drone blood. Um, I would be very cautious about, um window ring, unlimited village visibility, rain. Just because you have an electrical device, you can see that it's got open air events in here. So that is something that keeping mind. I'll be very cautious around sand, especially in that loan landing. Like I said, I grab it and again, don't grab it unless you have 100 hours of flying experience has that for my disclaimer. Don't land it by grabbing it out of the sky unless you have 100 hours of flying. And you're not an artist artist. Never, ever grab it out of the air. Okay, but every time you line your pretend you're crashes 90% of the time, we're gonna be on landing. So, um oh, you thought your sincerity is going to be more than my since in Syria. But sand and things like that are gonna be on landing. Um, visibility speaks for itself. Wind. You know anything over 10 knots, you can depend upon how many satellite links you have. You can actually fly with quite a bit of wind, but again, I wouldn't do it. There's no reason to risk it, especially if there's something challenge with there. We go some challenge with, and you can see that my preview. I set my preview back to really yucky mode. So since we're far away, um, since we don't have to worry about that now, it's gonna be beautiful and sharpen gorgeous. Look how good you look. Um, so wind rain, anything above 10 knots, you know, 15 knots at very most. That's quite a bit of speed right there. You know, probably five would be sensible. And, um, any other environmental concerns with, you know? Yeah. Don't do it around the ocean and water. Don't do anything that you've seen me do. Like this right here. You know, don't do you know certainly what you're learning. Okay, So back we've got our app here. How do you instigate it? Already showed you in preferences. I'm just gonna sweep to the right. And here is our current, um, ground station interface. If I click the little map arrow in the lower left hand corner, that's going to take me to where I currently am at this moment here at creative life. If I click on appear the compass in the upper right, it's that's now oriented to true North. This now is oriented based upon what I'm looking at. So that's kind of nice, because you can see where you are in the park, in relationship to your different points on and then simply if I come up here and I go, okay, here is a little you know, we'll consider this. You can see if I can get into a three D. Um, I want to start off here now, This one Because I don't have, um, an actual GPS lock on here. It's not. That's actually a good point. I did it when I was outside. The, um, copter needs to have at least six satellite locks in order to instigate this. It's a limited amount of range that it can fly in if we moved down here so much that we can see an airport which we can't see, Um, it is very cautious around airports. It has a very limited range in terms of how far it can go out, and it cannot even operate without a serious GPS lock. And that's why I can't click on here and set some points. The reason being, of course, is that it is taking control of the copter. And if it doesn't know exactly where it is in three D space, it's not even gonna let you. But that's basically what you have. If you notice up to the top, I have fast, medium and slow. Okay, so there's medium is the standard way of working. When I click on um, a point and said it. I can just go click, click, click IQ. I do have a, um we can move into. I think I've got the I don't have on this. One will shift over to here quickly and show you what the points look like. And then with each point as you click on it, it's going to give you the ability to set the altitude. And that's basically is the scenario. So here is the same thing we were just looking at and, uh and then setting the points. This is also not without the lock. This is the scenario. So, um, you can see this is taking a park and going around the parameter of it. Every time I click on one of the points, you can see that that height on 10. is now set to 25 feet and speed. This actually is using the IPad app, which gives you even more controls over the scenario. But it's similar in the sense that you set your points and then you'll hit down in the bottom where it says okay and you had go and it actually starts. So it's actually that that simple and that much control which, speaking off, we do have a video of that, um, which we've already loaded here. And that is the ground station. So here I'm setting it up, and we'll actually zoom up. So now we're in the park. I've turned on the compass in the upper right hand corner. So now you can see my orientation looking in there. And now I'm gonna come up and just simply start clicking on the points where I want the competent Go and you can see I'm looking at the edge of the field and I can see where the road is. And then once I've got those points, I click on it and set the height for each one of those points. Okay, so especially with an environment that you're familiar with, you know, And because what I would first do in this scenario, especially when you're wanting to check out the altitude, set each one of the, uh, points. And there's all my distance, the height, everything. Where I'm going, there's my four points. I say go. And it's going, Teoh. Now, without even meet launching it. I'm not turning it on. I'm not doing anything else. It just starts going? I was a little bit scary to trust it. I knew where that pole waas and it looks to me like it's going outside of that poll. It actually went inside of that poll, but I was like going okay, you said that you're not and it did it coming up here. Now you can go back to the actual cameras. And now I'm actually seeing what the camera is seeing and you can see as I continue on down, can't see where the cop is going. But I'm going to come up here and I'm actually panning down while I'm on that path. And now the bicycles are going past in anyway, So it allowed me to set exactly where I wanted to go. Exactly the distance. Exactly. Over the different elements that I wanted worked out great, absolutely loved it. The one thing that I would do that I had mentioned that if you know that I want to be at the top of that light over this location first, fly it normally as you would not using this technology, because remember the bottom. You've got an altitude height so you can see exactly where it is. you can see exactly that altitude and you go. You know what? If I'm gonna follow this tree line, but I'm gonna follow the top of the lighthouse, that lighthouse is 120 feet. I first fly it. I check my altitude at the bottom. It's 120 feet. I now can know that when I fly past that, I am looking right in the window of it. I've got that set up, so it's very, very cool, but first plotted out by first going to the different points you want to be at. Make sure that it really is that there's a straight line between those. There's not a problem. Check out the height and then by plotting out your course, it gives you this freedom because again, I could look anywhere that I wanted to. I can rotate that yaw while it's going this direction, and that's I hate to use the term bitchin someone I was teaching the other last week in Adobe Conference and one of my refuse Bitchin isn't a word. Shouldn't say bitchen. Yes, sir. Yeah. Uh, question. This is just regarding the altitude. Is that all relative to where you are? because if you go down in a canyon, you're really going negative balance. Great, Great question. It's all based upon your starting point. It is not your above sea level, so you need to compensate for the hill, right? So if you're flying from here to here and there's a hill between and you know the hills 20 feet and your said yet a 10 feet, it will not come over the hill, it will go straight into that hill and it will sleep well that night when it did so it could care less that you did not know. That's a very good point. It is a relative to your starting point and you'll notice I'm playing a lot off cliffs Really scary when you get into a negative altitude because it doesn't help me that I'm flying from the cliff. I have no idea how far I am off the water. Advanced flying technique. Don't try this at home, OK, Very good. Great questions. Any other questions at? Okay, um, Pano, let's get into some shooting. Um, we're going to start off by, um I think we'll do that panel. We need to get into something a za Pano right now, and I shot several pianos. Well, up here in Seattle, wanting to get local here is a little shot that I did yesterday at Woodland Park. Over water. Don't try this at home. It was actually beautiful. This has had that wonderful little colors on their again. I often will like getting establishing shot. You know, circle around here. I'll get myself in the shot just for fun. I'm letting it stabilized. You may have noticed for just a second. It blinked orange, which is like, That's scary because I'm getting I think I had six satellite lock. So again, I was very surprised that there wasn't more satellites. Seattle obviously is kind of 1/3 world country, and, you know, the NASA does not think it's worthy of multiple satellites, but anyway was scary. So I'm letting it just sit up there before I started flying in any significant way. And in the second you're going to see that I'm gonna head off toward those colorful trees off into the distance. Okay? And that will just close. This is the view from the, uh, phantom. So here's the view, and this is why we get so excited about it because you do get to play this whole Superman routine here and you'll actually see the dynamic range. You know, they're subtle color. There's no, you know, high contrast. So it doesn't shouldn't be surprising that you're getting some detail, but in a minute when you see me shooting the Pano, there's actually quite a lot of information in these files. J Peg or raw, but especially the raw. Remember when you're shooting raw? Um, basic raw versus JPEG, 101 A. J. Peg is a file that's been cooked in camera, all the settings on the camera, like sharpening and saturation everything or cooked into the file. It's also reduced down to eight bits of information per channel. You have red green blue channels, eight bits of information you all know to to the eighth. Power is I know what it's 256 colors, so 2 56 times to 56 times to 56 the three channels you end up with 16 million colors. If they're all in the right range, that's a lot of color. When you're shooting in a raw file format, you're typically going to be shooting eight or 12 bits of information per channel instead of 56 colors per channel this week. How it's a You've been ignoring me too long. Oh, I was sleeping better. Thank you for that. Um, to to the 10th power for the 12. Power to the 10th Power is 1000 to the 12th. Power is 4000 shades of each one of the color channels red, green, blue times 4000 times 4000 is, of course, just do that in your head. Wait, Jim, you got that 60 billion potential colors as opposed to 16 million exponentially greater potential colors in a raw file. That's why we get the greater dynamic range. It's also because things like your, um, contrast is not permanently built into the file. So where J. Peg will cook in the contrast setting in your camera into the file, a raw file lets you change the contrast after the fact. So you have more highlight and shadow detail. Okay, you get the idea, and let's see. So with that, let's, uh, do a pano first. I'll just show you the my nose, um, shooting the Pano and we'll do it this one I did on the field, but it's not nearly as pretty. And basically, you're going to come up here with the Pano and I'm gonna turn it on into I'm gonna turn it on into, um, the set, the exposure compensation. I'm under exposing it a little bit because I wanted to point up at the sky. I wanted to make sure that I had detail. So that was case. I definitely didn't want to blow it out. I had it set to, um, raw, and you'll notice how long it's taking per shot. So now I'm going to rotate ever so slightly and stop. I can't do this on the fly. So there is another one I keep looking up. Does 1 1000 to 3 poor with 56? Probably a good 10 seconds, and you should count on, depending upon the speed of your card for each one of the shots. Fortunately, again with that GPS lock, it's doing a great job of being the tripod. But it's not perfect, and that's where we're going to take advantage of the auto line capabilities of Photoshopped to do our scenario. Okay, so that is shooting the panel we're going to go back to that lake. And actually that was the one that didn't have my nose in it. So, uh, and while we're here, let's also just do show it to you, this tilting again that the accelerometer and I can even do that. Hey, Official. So the accelerometers, this one right here and you can see I'm just I'm not touching the camera controls. I'm literally just moving my entire there's Bren forms and I'm just moving. The basically the IPhone is what's registering this tilt. So it's actually quite nice, and and I think that it does a smoother job of tilting than using the little handheld arrows on the left hand side. So that is using the accelerometer to do a smooth, you know, a little tilt down into the file it's all about, especially if you're gonna try. And do you use this for video of any significant way to get the smoothest shot you can? That means moving slow, smart, tiny little increments and having a really good gimble on that scenario.