Since I live in Southeastern Utah where there are hundreds of canyons I was interested in watching your video. Tripod is very slow and attention span that people seem to have these days is very short. I routinely double the speed of a video in Adobe Premiere pro. I thought you did an excellent job of keeping the video centered on the bottom of the canyon as the drone flew. Also your change of altitude as you flew was smooth. About what altitude did you maintain above the trees as you flew up the canyon?
Thanks! I didn't speed up the video because my main purpose was to illustrate the detail possible. As a new
MA2 user I was simply impressed by it.
There are a couple of spots where the altitude transitions weren't very smooth, though. I mostly kept the altitude joystick in one position and varied the speed slightly to follow the terrain upwards. That seems to work better (smoother) for me than keeping the speed constant and trying to change the rate of elevation change, but I still messed up in a couple of places. The terrain elevation change from start to finish of the run was right at 400 feet.
Because of that terrain elevation change my drone elevations as reported in the .srt file superficially exceed the normal 400 foot legal limit, and if challenged I'd like to be able to quickly and easily prove I was actually legal. I ran the video through DroneViewer so that I could export the path to a .kml file, and then opened the .kml file in Google Earth. The free online GPS Visualizer lets you do the same thing. By comparing several points on the Google Earth path to the corresponding lat/long points in the .srt file from the camera I was able to manually determine my height directly above terrain at those points ... which turned out to be pretty consistent at about 60 feet. I've tried to come up with a more automated way to calculate my actual elevation above terrain for a path that I've taken, but no luck so far. The online path evaluators I've found simply strip the elevation data from the .srt file and just overlay the result on Google Earth. That is useful for finding the ground path data, but you can't pull the path terrain data from Google Earth without using Google's Elevation.api (requires an account) and writing some code to extract it ... and their policy also requires that you display the result in a Google map (Maps, Earth, whatever).
I know that Litchi (which apparently has a limited Google .APi account) has an option to plot missions in terms of height above terrain from their mission web site, and they appear to avoid the Elevation.api usage limitations by having
our browser (not theirs) pull the elevation data from the API. The problem at the moment is that Litchi hasn't yet incorporated the latest
MA2 software devlopment kit, so Litchi doesn't curently work with the
MA2. Maven does work with the
MA2, though (although not in terms of height above terrain), and I just found out from the Maven author that one of the next Maven updates will hopefully include the ability to import a Litchi mission into Maven via a .csv file. That could be useful for folks like us who live in mountainous areas since both apps are pretty inexpensive.
Sorry for the really long answer!