Camera focusing, whether automatic or manual, simply does not work for the Litchi app on the DJI Mavic at all. None of my videos taken with the Litchi app have come out correctly, despite my attempts to correct the issues, and all have been so blurry as to being completely unusable and unwatchable. While I have encountered problems with the DJI GO app in terms of setting camera focus, they have been corrected for the most part and I can now get videos with great sharp focus when using the DJI GO app, (albiet having to do a few extra steps each flight) however the same could not be said for the Litchi app on the Mavic.
Mainly, I decided to buy the Litchi app instead of just using the default DJI Go app because for some reason DJI decided that waypoints must be preflown and also doesn't support more robust waypoint functionalities such as Litchi's and the other competitor of AutoLogic's Autopilot. Since I have an andriod phone and tablet and not an Apple person and Autopilot is only available on iOS at the moment, that means right now Litchi is the only real option for me. If DJI had supported more robust Waypointing and other things I surmise a lot of people wouldn't even need to upgrade to the Litchi app.
Suffice it to say, I found the Litchi app buggy when it came to focusing the camera for video taking. Upon takeoff before using the Litchi's waypoint functionality to go on missions, I would often touch/tap to focus on an object in the distance to attempt to correctly set focus but everytime it would say something along the lines of "command timed out", and gave some wierd error message on the screen, and on the rare occasions that it finally took the focus command, it would momentarily get into focus, just to for no reason on its own seconds later get out of focus again. Being the Mavic has such a short battery life, and that the whole point of using Litchi's waypoints is for longer missions, I can't afford to waste five or ten minutes before each and every mission to fiddle around with the glitchy app focusing issues to get it just right, only to have it revert to blurry focus the moment it starts its waypoint missions. I also tried in the Litchi app to map "Center Focusing" to certain keys on the controller but although the mapping itself seemed to have worked, the actual focusing still doesn't get a good focus, and would lose focus immediately after getting a focus whenever it does get a focus. Effectively, all my videos taken with Litchi while flying waypoints have come back completely blurry and unwatchable, especially at night time, but also for day time videos/flights too. I have tried everything I could think of at this point and read the manual and help sections... So it is unusable for its intented purpose unless fixed by the developer support.
In my troubleshooting and as a hope of finding a means to get around this and solve the focusing issues, I attempted to set manual focus to the far distance in the DJI GO app and then hoping that it would carry over to the Litchi app. (in the past I found that many settings set in the DJI GO app such as battery warning level settings, etc carries over to the Litchi app so I was hoping for focus or locked manual focus that this might be the case too) I found that after setting focus to manual in the DJI GO app, in the Litchi app all focusing functionality stops working. If I were to touch/tap the screen, Litchi would completely refuse to even attempt to focus at all and in fact tells me that focusing has been disabled etc. However, when actually taking videos on flights I found that the Litchi app didn't actually abide by the manual focus settings that I had calibrated and set in the DJI GO app and it for unknown reasons used a completely different focus setting of its own, (while refusing to let me change focus since apparently once Manual focus is set in the DJI Go app the Litchi app completely stops letting users set focus at all) making this potential workaround absolutely unusable as well.
Last but not least, on waypoint missions when I had set POI's and then instructed the Litchi app to "focus" on certain POI's along certain waypoints, I imagined that in addition to calculating the pitch down angle of the gimbal based upon Waypoint distance/positioning and waypoint height, etc that it would also manually or automatically adjust the focus smartly as well in order to capture the POI at its sharpest possible settings, however through many test and trials, it seems this is not at all the case and there is no smart or intelligent camera focusing abilities or functionalities in the Litchi app.
For me, on waypoint mission flights my rc signal would often get lost at about 0.75 miles distance, much much less than the advertised 4.7 miles that DJI had promised, though to its credit, Litchi app seems to allow the Mavic to continue to rest of the mission unimpeded until it cames back within rc range again. The problem being, during the vast majority of these mission segments, since it is often out of rc range or suffers loss of rc signal, I wouldn't even be theoretically able to set /tap/touch to focus even if I wanted to, meaning the only way for me to keep these segments of these flights on focus is to either set a manual focus or to somehow lock the focus at a particular setting so that the camera cannot change focus again throughout the entire duration of the flight. However Litchi doesn't support and in fact has issues with all of these potential solutions. I don't see an option to hard lock a camera focus setting in the Litchi app, nor even an option to set manual focus in the same way that one can set a manual focus in the DJI app, and even when I set a manual focus in the DJI app it doesn't carry over to the Litchi app (as described above) and in fact makes it worse than before since it breaks focusing functionality in the Litchi app and Litchi won't even let me tap/touch to focus at all anymore.
Can any other Litchi Mavic users speak to these issues or am I doing something wrong or missing something that is easily solvable?
Why is there not an option or setting in the Litchi app to set a hard lock focus setting so that focus is locked at that setting for the entire duration of the flight? This would seem to solve the horrible automatic focus (unusable) issues that I'm having with the autofocus in the Mavic with the Litchi app, and also for long waypoint missions where rc signal is lost, having the ability to manually pre-set a focus setting and have the app hard lock it for the entire duration of the mission would come in extremely handy as an option of last resort.
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By default, all videos taken from the Mavic should strongly lean towards being more or less sharp by default for the vast majority of actual end user use cases as opposed to being by default almost entirely blurry and absolutely out of focus for each and every time a video is taken on a flight unless users actively remembers to intervene to help the Mavic set the correct focus. This is not only counterintuitive and DJI not only set 100% completely WRONG default settings/options/parameters etc but it runs against DJI's claim that the Mavic is its most simple and easy to use aerial photography drone, since even its Phantom series never had this "problem".
Also, in my opinion for a so-called "intelligent drone" that can take selfies, collision avoidance, active track this and redundant sensor that, etc it sure seems not so "intelligent" and "user friendly" or whatever one wishes to call it for DJI to essentially force the user to set the focus on each and every flight or else the video comes out all blurry. If its "deep learning" algorithm's can recognize a cat and a dog and a car and a human face, I expect it to be smart enough to take sharp videos without human intervention of having to manually set focus each and every time or else it DEFAULTS to blurry unwatchable videos EVERY SINGLE TIME. This is not normal. It is hard enough to worry about flying one shouldn't be forced to worry about a glitching camera focusing issue at the same time for each and every flight. It is so unusual that it caught many reporters and expert reviewers off guard when the Mavic first came out and they were reviewing the Mavic and they thought the camera was bad because all videos were blurry (by default) for them too. Yes, I get the photographic reasoning behind why or at least what motivated DJI to make this change as opposed or when compared to the settings in the predecessor Phantom drones for example, but it seems especially since the Mavic is targeted towards the more consumer/casual audience and touted by DJI as being a "convenient" drone ready at the moment to take off and snap pictures and take videos etc that this camera focusing "issue" of not being able to by default take sharp videos, is one of THE biggest dings for the Mavic that DJI should immediately fix in the next firmware update or in the next hardware version of Mavic 2. If DJI wants to set focus to something it should be the opposite default setting of sharp at distance, not blurry at distance, DJI set the completely wrong defaults that 99% of the use case for this drone/camera doesn't even apply for, it is completely illogical and makes no sense whatsoever. At the very least, DJI should give the end user a setting or option to manually override and set his or her own default settings. It is absolutely unacceptable to spend $1000 - $1500 on a drone and have it by default off the shelf out of the box take videos that are blurry and completely unwatchable. Especially for newcomers to this hobby or for people which whom the Mavic is their first drone experience, it is hard enough to master the flying aspect of it all without having to fiddle with the inconsistent and glitching camera/gimbal and now this huge focusing issue, then to finally upon successful flight attempt to watch the video only to find time and again that it was blurry and all the great recorders are unwatchable. Many user's first time flying experience with the DJI have been scarred and marred with bad memories of their first time videos coming out completely unwatchable after spending upwards of $1500 on a 4k camera getting worse than first generation flip phone camera videos, and its bad enough that the microprint font sized manual doesn't speak to this whatsoever nor warn the users of this critial design flaw that is completely counterintuitive. First impressions are important and for the vast majority of these newcomers, these first moments and first videos can never be brought back. The fact that DJI screwed this up so badly on a so-called smart drone is unacceptable and complete goes counter to philosophies such as Amazon's philosophy of "frustration free packaging" and whatnot. Whoever at DJI thought this was be a good change really hadn't thought it through or considered it from the actual end user perspective. Mavic being personally my first drone experience, I found the flight and flying aspect to this drone absolutely intuitive and a joy to fly, but the camera and video aspect to this drone absolutely horrible, counterintuitive, with the vast majority of my initial videos taken on the Mavic turning out to be completely useless and absolutely unwatchable. Given the stark juxaposition between experiences (day and night comparison really) between the flight experience with the Mavic and the camera experience with the Mavic, it seems DJI is really lacking in the camera/video experience, and a lot of it is due to the way they forced this new setting on users without setting it to a better default and without giving the end user any choice in the matter.
Mainly, I decided to buy the Litchi app instead of just using the default DJI Go app because for some reason DJI decided that waypoints must be preflown and also doesn't support more robust waypoint functionalities such as Litchi's and the other competitor of AutoLogic's Autopilot. Since I have an andriod phone and tablet and not an Apple person and Autopilot is only available on iOS at the moment, that means right now Litchi is the only real option for me. If DJI had supported more robust Waypointing and other things I surmise a lot of people wouldn't even need to upgrade to the Litchi app.
Suffice it to say, I found the Litchi app buggy when it came to focusing the camera for video taking. Upon takeoff before using the Litchi's waypoint functionality to go on missions, I would often touch/tap to focus on an object in the distance to attempt to correctly set focus but everytime it would say something along the lines of "command timed out", and gave some wierd error message on the screen, and on the rare occasions that it finally took the focus command, it would momentarily get into focus, just to for no reason on its own seconds later get out of focus again. Being the Mavic has such a short battery life, and that the whole point of using Litchi's waypoints is for longer missions, I can't afford to waste five or ten minutes before each and every mission to fiddle around with the glitchy app focusing issues to get it just right, only to have it revert to blurry focus the moment it starts its waypoint missions. I also tried in the Litchi app to map "Center Focusing" to certain keys on the controller but although the mapping itself seemed to have worked, the actual focusing still doesn't get a good focus, and would lose focus immediately after getting a focus whenever it does get a focus. Effectively, all my videos taken with Litchi while flying waypoints have come back completely blurry and unwatchable, especially at night time, but also for day time videos/flights too. I have tried everything I could think of at this point and read the manual and help sections... So it is unusable for its intented purpose unless fixed by the developer support.
In my troubleshooting and as a hope of finding a means to get around this and solve the focusing issues, I attempted to set manual focus to the far distance in the DJI GO app and then hoping that it would carry over to the Litchi app. (in the past I found that many settings set in the DJI GO app such as battery warning level settings, etc carries over to the Litchi app so I was hoping for focus or locked manual focus that this might be the case too) I found that after setting focus to manual in the DJI GO app, in the Litchi app all focusing functionality stops working. If I were to touch/tap the screen, Litchi would completely refuse to even attempt to focus at all and in fact tells me that focusing has been disabled etc. However, when actually taking videos on flights I found that the Litchi app didn't actually abide by the manual focus settings that I had calibrated and set in the DJI GO app and it for unknown reasons used a completely different focus setting of its own, (while refusing to let me change focus since apparently once Manual focus is set in the DJI Go app the Litchi app completely stops letting users set focus at all) making this potential workaround absolutely unusable as well.
Last but not least, on waypoint missions when I had set POI's and then instructed the Litchi app to "focus" on certain POI's along certain waypoints, I imagined that in addition to calculating the pitch down angle of the gimbal based upon Waypoint distance/positioning and waypoint height, etc that it would also manually or automatically adjust the focus smartly as well in order to capture the POI at its sharpest possible settings, however through many test and trials, it seems this is not at all the case and there is no smart or intelligent camera focusing abilities or functionalities in the Litchi app.
For me, on waypoint mission flights my rc signal would often get lost at about 0.75 miles distance, much much less than the advertised 4.7 miles that DJI had promised, though to its credit, Litchi app seems to allow the Mavic to continue to rest of the mission unimpeded until it cames back within rc range again. The problem being, during the vast majority of these mission segments, since it is often out of rc range or suffers loss of rc signal, I wouldn't even be theoretically able to set /tap/touch to focus even if I wanted to, meaning the only way for me to keep these segments of these flights on focus is to either set a manual focus or to somehow lock the focus at a particular setting so that the camera cannot change focus again throughout the entire duration of the flight. However Litchi doesn't support and in fact has issues with all of these potential solutions. I don't see an option to hard lock a camera focus setting in the Litchi app, nor even an option to set manual focus in the same way that one can set a manual focus in the DJI app, and even when I set a manual focus in the DJI app it doesn't carry over to the Litchi app (as described above) and in fact makes it worse than before since it breaks focusing functionality in the Litchi app and Litchi won't even let me tap/touch to focus at all anymore.
Can any other Litchi Mavic users speak to these issues or am I doing something wrong or missing something that is easily solvable?
Why is there not an option or setting in the Litchi app to set a hard lock focus setting so that focus is locked at that setting for the entire duration of the flight? This would seem to solve the horrible automatic focus (unusable) issues that I'm having with the autofocus in the Mavic with the Litchi app, and also for long waypoint missions where rc signal is lost, having the ability to manually pre-set a focus setting and have the app hard lock it for the entire duration of the mission would come in extremely handy as an option of last resort.
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By default, all videos taken from the Mavic should strongly lean towards being more or less sharp by default for the vast majority of actual end user use cases as opposed to being by default almost entirely blurry and absolutely out of focus for each and every time a video is taken on a flight unless users actively remembers to intervene to help the Mavic set the correct focus. This is not only counterintuitive and DJI not only set 100% completely WRONG default settings/options/parameters etc but it runs against DJI's claim that the Mavic is its most simple and easy to use aerial photography drone, since even its Phantom series never had this "problem".
Also, in my opinion for a so-called "intelligent drone" that can take selfies, collision avoidance, active track this and redundant sensor that, etc it sure seems not so "intelligent" and "user friendly" or whatever one wishes to call it for DJI to essentially force the user to set the focus on each and every flight or else the video comes out all blurry. If its "deep learning" algorithm's can recognize a cat and a dog and a car and a human face, I expect it to be smart enough to take sharp videos without human intervention of having to manually set focus each and every time or else it DEFAULTS to blurry unwatchable videos EVERY SINGLE TIME. This is not normal. It is hard enough to worry about flying one shouldn't be forced to worry about a glitching camera focusing issue at the same time for each and every flight. It is so unusual that it caught many reporters and expert reviewers off guard when the Mavic first came out and they were reviewing the Mavic and they thought the camera was bad because all videos were blurry (by default) for them too. Yes, I get the photographic reasoning behind why or at least what motivated DJI to make this change as opposed or when compared to the settings in the predecessor Phantom drones for example, but it seems especially since the Mavic is targeted towards the more consumer/casual audience and touted by DJI as being a "convenient" drone ready at the moment to take off and snap pictures and take videos etc that this camera focusing "issue" of not being able to by default take sharp videos, is one of THE biggest dings for the Mavic that DJI should immediately fix in the next firmware update or in the next hardware version of Mavic 2. If DJI wants to set focus to something it should be the opposite default setting of sharp at distance, not blurry at distance, DJI set the completely wrong defaults that 99% of the use case for this drone/camera doesn't even apply for, it is completely illogical and makes no sense whatsoever. At the very least, DJI should give the end user a setting or option to manually override and set his or her own default settings. It is absolutely unacceptable to spend $1000 - $1500 on a drone and have it by default off the shelf out of the box take videos that are blurry and completely unwatchable. Especially for newcomers to this hobby or for people which whom the Mavic is their first drone experience, it is hard enough to master the flying aspect of it all without having to fiddle with the inconsistent and glitching camera/gimbal and now this huge focusing issue, then to finally upon successful flight attempt to watch the video only to find time and again that it was blurry and all the great recorders are unwatchable. Many user's first time flying experience with the DJI have been scarred and marred with bad memories of their first time videos coming out completely unwatchable after spending upwards of $1500 on a 4k camera getting worse than first generation flip phone camera videos, and its bad enough that the microprint font sized manual doesn't speak to this whatsoever nor warn the users of this critial design flaw that is completely counterintuitive. First impressions are important and for the vast majority of these newcomers, these first moments and first videos can never be brought back. The fact that DJI screwed this up so badly on a so-called smart drone is unacceptable and complete goes counter to philosophies such as Amazon's philosophy of "frustration free packaging" and whatnot. Whoever at DJI thought this was be a good change really hadn't thought it through or considered it from the actual end user perspective. Mavic being personally my first drone experience, I found the flight and flying aspect to this drone absolutely intuitive and a joy to fly, but the camera and video aspect to this drone absolutely horrible, counterintuitive, with the vast majority of my initial videos taken on the Mavic turning out to be completely useless and absolutely unwatchable. Given the stark juxaposition between experiences (day and night comparison really) between the flight experience with the Mavic and the camera experience with the Mavic, it seems DJI is really lacking in the camera/video experience, and a lot of it is due to the way they forced this new setting on users without setting it to a better default and without giving the end user any choice in the matter.
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