Technique Question - how to keep camera on fixed point?

[ddodell]

New to the Mavic and video recording from a drone.

Was flying around today, and wonder if someone can explain a good technique on keeping focus and pointed at a point ahead.

I'm familiar with some of the "follow-me" type modes, and have used these to great success ... but this is what I want to do / video

Have drone about 500 feet out, but as coming forward towards the point of interest, I'm finding I'm having to constantly readjust my gimbal to keep the video on the point of interest due to the constant changing angulation as the drone gets closer.

Is there an automated mode I'm missing that will keep the camera aimed at that point in the distance, auto adjusting the gimbal, or suggestion on doing this "smoothly" ... my manual gimbal skills look at little jumpy

 

[lisadoc]

Litchi and Autopilot and FPV do this very well. One of the best reasons to get one of those programs.

 

[dewster]

That's a good question. I think it may be easier the further you are away from your focal point. It takes a steady hand and practice doing it manually. You could just program an orbit and edit the usable footage.

As much as I would like to use other apps I keep reading about flyaways etc. Maybe the negative reviews are from only a few of the users.

 

[lisadoc]

As much as I would like to use other apps I keep reading about flyaways etc. Maybe the negative reviews are from only a few of the users.

I don't think fly-aways are any more common with Litchi/Autopilot/etc than they are with DJI Go. And if you really look into those cases where people are claiming such incidents, most are caused by user error or hardware malfunctions, not the idiosyncrasies of the apps.

 

[tracer bullet]

I set the sensitivity of my gimbal pretty low, and it helps a lot with doing it manually. Try a change if you're still on the factory settings. Start with half the original value perhaps.

After that I just use a light touch on the dial, rotating it just enough to cause it to do something. You'll see it go from grayed out to white if you are making it move.

It helped a lot anyhow, but I'm still certainly not great at it. Litchi seems like a good recommendation. I wouldn't be worried about the program, I agree with the above post most flyaways seem to be user error, often with bad RTH settings. Not always of course, but when something happens it doesn't seem to be litchi's fault or that Litchi was even used.