Whats the general consensus here? Do you press record when you are about to take off, or start when you are in a position to take a video, and stop when the shot you want is complete?
the question is 100% open ended. It all depends on the person flying and what they are doing.
making continuous video from takeoff to landing wouldn't be good for me since I also take still shots pretty often when something interesting comes to my view during recording.
It has already been established that the current draw from recording continuous video has virtually no effect upon flight time. Seconds at best over a 25 minute flight.Capturing, processing, and saving video will contribute to reducing the battery life, and I'd rather have as much flight time out of my batteries as possible - especially if recharging during the day isn't an option.
It has already been established that the current draw from recording continuous video has virtually no effect upon flight time. Seconds at best over a 25 minute flight.
I treat every flight as an additional opportunity to explore, and recording continuous 4K video, as I explore, provides an opportunity to see what I missed on the FPV, after the flight is over on a large 4K desktop monitor. Storage is cheap. Decent still frames worthy of at least an 8x10 print can easily also be extracted from the 4K video in post. I also frequently shoot spherical panoramas, but still record continuous video in between the panos. Full flight of 4K is less than 20GB of video. 8TB hard drives are $120. That's enough to hold a year's worth of raw video. Add another HD for a backup. Add a third HD for rendered output. Upload all output to an unlisted YouTube account. Swap microSD cards every time you swap batteries. Have enough 64GB microSD cards to cover all flights until you get back home. Works for me!Yeah, I was figuring that the motors would consume the lion's share of any battery life, it just never bothered me enough to go and find out how much.
As others have noted though, I think what works best will depend more on how and what you shoot, rather than there being any particular advantage to continual shooting. I guess storage limitations might be a factor too, especially if you're on a multi-day trip and like to have all your video at the highest possible quality.
In my case I do a mix of stills and video, often using angle-dependent filters like CPs and GNDs, so I tend to have a shooting plan (which might involve multiple flights) before I even leave the ground. Once I've shot that, plus anything I noticed once in the air, then I'll go and explore a bit and hopefully turn up something else of interest, but that's as likely to be a still as video. I suspect that on some level I probably also find it easier to make the mental video/still mode switch if I'm also physically toggling the drone between modes.
Recording the live flying screen is definitely a benefit. Until recently, it was difficult to do on any iOS device. I try and keep the device resources as free as possible, to leave them all for the GO 4 app, and haven't yet taken adbpvantage of that option, and my flying iPads are also still on older iOS versions that don't support screen recording, and it would likely tax them severely, as they are also several years old.It is much easier (at least with my workflow and editing style) to plan each clip and edit multiple smaller ones rather than dividing and reassembling one long one.
However, I tend to record the screen on my phone for the entire flight in case something goes wrong and I want to analyze it (this is easy to do on my iPhone and probably an Android). Of course, if I lose transmission downlink that won’t help, but it provides more info than just a video (at least without correlating telematics afterward), and if something happened and I lost the drone, I’d have video saved on my phone with all the data. If it’s a routine flight on my own land with no chance of losing it even if it falls out of the sky, I might not bother, but I usually do.
99% (probably more) of the time I delete the video from my phone shortly after I land, but I like knowing I’ve got a recording of the entire flight if I need it.
Recording the live flying screen is definitely a benefit. Until recently, it was difficult to do on any iOS device. I try and keep the device resources as free as possible, to leave them all for the GO 4 app, and haven't yet taken adbpvantage of that option, and my flying iPads are also still on older iOS versions that don't support screen recording, and it would likely tax them severely, as they are also several years old.
From take off to landing. There have been so many times that I capture a great clip unexpectedly when I review the footage. And it is super easy to delete/trim unwanted footage.
I do plan my movie shots ahead of time but I'd say 10-20% I capture something unplanned.