The only negative I have to say is that if you crash your drone using Litch, DJI Care wouldn't cover that. They examine the flight logs on the drone (or what's left of it!) and refuse to do it under the policy if you weren't using their app. Having said that, DJI waypoints is not in the same league as Litchi. I'm playing around with Litch Spiral at the moment and boy - what a tool that is!
I did a test between Litchi and waypoints 2.0 on my
Mavic 2 zoom. I was flying backwards in a straight line from a set of steps, over a tall shrub, over a pavilion and ultimately over the beach behind with the steps remaining the focus point. Simple run. Start point, end point and 2 waypoints.
With waypoints 2 I programmed it on my iPad I use for flying, adjusted the speeds, heights and so on. Frankly it was quite labour intensive. I got to the site and flew the mission. Firstly, the drone decided to halt at each waypoint for a second (never found out why), and the waypoints needed jigging. That was a pain, and in the end I decided to abandon that approach and start a new run where I recorded the waypoints by positioning the drone and pressing the buttons on the controller. Again, that was far from simple and the result was better. However, it still stopped at each waypoint.
Gave up and came home.
I decided to have a go with Litchi instead. I set up the waypoints on my PC and used Virtual Litchi Mission to test it. On site I had to slightly adjust the first 2 waypoints in order to line up accurately, but it was a LOT easier to do on site and save it. I then managed to fly the mission a couple of times, and used the controller to ramp up the speed as the drone flew backwards. That gave me a choice of shots to use in post.
Tell a lie - just looking back to find the shot I'm talking about, and I ran the mission 5 times with varying degrees of manual speed control. The version below is the shot I used in my video. I have included everything from the take off to the RTH initialisation. Obviously the final cut starts from the point it starts moving backwards.
It was for a video celebrating us being married for 25 years, as this was the spot we had our pictures taken. The video starts with a still of the wedding photos that I had a zoom running on that faded out and merged it with the start of this to give the effect the past merging into the present. This is why the waypoints had to be dead accurate to enable the fade between the two. Litchi could do it, Waypoints 2 just couldn't.
The shot was taken in D-Cinelike hence it's flat appearance, and I time ramped the speed up for the last part. But this is the shot direct from the drone.
