Air 2 Drone run up an Arizona canyon

[AZDave]

I've only made a few flights with my MA2, but I'm really impressed with the detail in the videos even in Auto mode. This one was shot 4K60 with no post editing other than to join the clips, and the colors are washed out because of the low winter sun ... although I did use an ND16 filter to try to deepen things a bit. I didn't add any music because I would have had to do that in one of my editors before upload to YouTube (none of the stock YouTube sound clips were long enough), and I wanted to show what the video looks like straight out of the drone.

 

[John235]

Beautiful. When the blue of the sky first came in to view, I thought it was a lake or pond. My perspective was a bit off.

 

[Dale D]

I've only made a few flights with my MA2, but I'm really impressed with the detail in the videos even in Auto mode. This one was shot 4K60 with no post editing other than to join the clips, and the colors are washed out because of the low winter sun ... although I did use an ND16 filter to try to deepen things a bit. I didn't add any music because I would have had to do that in one of my editors before upload to YouTube (none of the stock YouTube sound clips were long enough), and I wanted to show what the video looks like straight out of the drone.

I had to stop it at 2 minutes. Long, and boring, no music, washed out color. Watching a canyon for 6 minutes not very interesting. Told no story. You can always add a 2nd music track if needed.

 

[eaglesurfing]

Thanks for sharing.

 

[hiflyer201]

I liked the reveal at the end. How long did it take you to upload that at 4k?

 

[MavRik]

I've only made a few flights with my MA2, but I'm really impressed with the detail in the videos even in Auto mode. This one was shot 4K60 with no post editing other than to join the clips, and the colors are washed out because of the low winter sun ... although I did use an ND16 filter to try to deepen things a bit. I didn't add any music because I would have had to do that in one of my editors before upload to YouTube (none of the stock YouTube sound clips were long enough), and I wanted to show what the video looks like straight out of the drone.

Very interesting video with the nice cinematic smoothness of turns. Enjoyed the view!

 

[AZDave]

I had to stop it at 2 minutes. Long, and boring, no music, washed out color. Watching a canyon for 6 minutes not very interesting. Told no story. You can always add a 2nd music track if needed.

I'm pretty certain that the post stated right up front that the colors were washed out, and that no music was added because of no editing. The only "story" I tried to tell was how detailed the video could be straight out of the camera. You should have been able learn all of that without watching the video at all. I guess I need to try to be more explicit next time.

The video was six minutes long because that's how long it took to climb the canyon.

 

[AZDave]

I liked the reveal at the end. How long did it take you to upload that at 4k?

I think it took about an hour. My internet speeds are decent, but variable ... probably average about 15 to 20 meg upload.

It took YouTube more than a day to process it to 4K, though. It always gets there eventually, but can take quite a lot of time for them to get around to it. The monetized and high volume accounts get priority ... and I would to the same if I was Google. Money is money.

 

[AZDave]

Very interesting video with the nice cinematic smoothness of turns. Enjoyed the view!

Thanks! Did you spot the deer at about 3:10? And if you look very closely in the upper left at around 2:30 you can spot a large vertically-oriented cylindrical tank that cattlemen once used to store water they brought down via pipe from a spring that lies just to the left of the big rock in the center of the screen at 4:00.

 

[Photo Beaty]

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?

 

[AZDave]

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!

 

[MavRik]

Thanks! Did you spot the deer at about 3:10? And if you look very closely in the upper left at around 2:30 you can spot a large vertically-oriented cylindrical tank that cattlemen once used to store water they brought down via pipe from a spring that lies just to the left of the big rock in the center of the screen at 4:00.

Yes, I did see the deer at around the 2:48 time mark when it moved it's head (most likely to the prop sounds). Missed the cylinder though, will check that out!

 

[Josiah S]

Looks great. I am also impressesed with the ma2 video quality.

 

[Lets Fly]

It was long but I like looking for details in places I could never go. I was looking for wildlife all the way up and not a snake, rabbit, lizard or bird, and then you mentioned the deer. I completely missed that. Going back to find the cylinder.

 

[AZDave]

It was long but I like looking for details in places I could never go. I was looking for wildlife all the way up and not a snake, rabbit, lizard or bird, and then you mentioned the deer. I completely missed that. Going back to find the cylinder.

The cylinder just comes into view at 2:00 ... 30% of the screen from the left side, and 25% from the top of the screen. It's under a tree and looks black, but is just all rusty. At 2:40 you can see another steel tub in the very upper left corner (same frames as for the deer). There are actually two tubs there, but one is very hard to pick out.

I have scoured this video looking for critters other than the one deer, but also did not spot anything. Hunters have seen both bear and mountain lion on this mountainside, though. I live at the mouth of this canyon and early one evening at dusk, while throwing a ball for my dog, I heard a loud snarl down in the ravine. The next day we found a freshly killed deer about 150 feet from where I was throwing the ball. My goal is to some day spot a mountain lion with the drone up in the canyon and try to get some video of it in Spotlight mode.