NightFly - a Mavic Mini CinePATHIC Night clip

m80116 · Mar 19, 2020

OK, here's a CinePATHIC Mavic Mini short movie clip, entirely shot with the little critter and put together using my usual cursing and misery resources.

1080p 29.97fps worked directly on memory card, old fashion disk drive and 2013 editing software. Most footage is shot at 25 fps and sped up to 1.199 or 2.398 ratio (effectively condensing 30 fps and 60fps), the frame cut is 21:9 CinemaScope like.

The idea was born from the somewhat limited capability of the Mavic Mini compared to other DJI drones, even the bottom tier range, to deal with low light situations. The Mavic Air for instance is definitely brighter... so I decided to capture some dusk footage to see how far I could push my Mini, and I pleasantly surprised myself. DJI most probably deliberately chose not to apply any sort of visible noise reduction, thus the low lights detail remains good and quite usable to boost up to good levels.

Jerry Campbell · Mar 20, 2020

This looks good but do you have a day wavier to do the night flight

m80116 · Mar 20, 2020

Nope. In Italy you're not allowed to FLY at all.

You cannot fly anything below something like 50 meters and no more than 75 meters (stand to be corrected), you cannot fly over towns, houses, roads, persons, parks (both national and recreational). Insurance policies don't cover anything like that. And you have to maintain vLoS, i.e. 50 to 100 meters with something as small like the MM, and never at dusk (as you can't see it).

Technically speaking shooting a movie of a beautiful potato field is fine.

m80116 · Mar 28, 2020

I've made kind of a follow up. I promise I will never ever made a video without a point or content like this ever again. But since I've made it... here it is. City, dawn, dusk... no night here, just some smoke (and haze).