- Joined
- Oct 17, 2020
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- Age
- 44
- Location
- Grand Rapids, MI
- Site
- karlblessing.com
I mainly got the Litchi app hoping to get something very similar to Point-of-Interest mode on the higher end drones, especially as trying to use something like circle/helix quickshot on the DJI Fly app doesn't exactly like to track larger objects (especially as the 'face' of where it is focused on will become obscured half way around). Also because I wanted to play around with the automatic panoramic creation which is definitely a time saver as I was already doing the overlapped views manually for later creation.
Saturation, Contrast, Sharpness
What I did like seeing was that I could change the saturation, contrast, and sharpness of both video and photos (from -3 to +3 range), since the camera on the mini doesn't seem that great to begin with, at least for video I could least pull back on any destruction of some detail by reducing a little bit of the saturation or contrast. It's not much, but helped in my case.
Focus Mode
The "focus" mode is probably the closest I could find to what would be a POI mode, and while it does seem to work, I didn't care for how jerky it's rotation adjustments seemed on the drone itself. Instead of smoothly staying horizontally fixed to the designated point it seems to drift a little, and then quickly re-adjust the viewpoint quite noticeably, and short of speed of flight, I could do that smoother manually.
The gimbal tilt seems to track very smooth and well though, so my thoughts on future flights is that I could turn off aircraft rotation, and just let the gimbal be controlled automatically since that's usually where I have the most trouble when controlling all three.
I haven't tried Follow/Orbit (points towards your GPS location of your device), as I'm not usually going to be doing that, and it seems from other video demos I've seen, to sort of lag here and there instead of staying with a target smoothly (probably due to the wide margin of GPS accuracy?). Likewise I haven't really tested the tracking (visual target, like active track), but I know it works, but can lose the target pretty easily, much like losing the target in quickshot if you start moving (it'll still try, but isn't hard to lose as it won't move out of its path to rotate).
Panaoramic Mode
I'm still getting used to this one as I'm used to visually finding landmarks in the frame and overlapping at that point, but it definitely does work for the intended purpose. I just have to figure out how many colums/rows are appropriate for narrower compositions (as there's no sense in doing 35+ shots for an area that's only going to yield a 30 megapixel result that could have been done in half the frames). The maximum vertical degree I would set being 85° (guessing within the 20 degree upward, down to I think 90 degree down if I remember correctly)
A 360 degree example (which does show up on facebook as such when changing the EXIF to think its a Richo Theta S)
180 degree example (best I can recall)
A narrower field of view with 24 shots resulting in a 28 megapixel stitch.
In the video clips I took at various locations, I mainly grabbed clips using reduced saturation, contrast, and sharpness to allow for some of that minor tweaking in Davinci Resolve Studio (granted the camera as I stated before isn't that great, so I imagine it's only a minor benefit), with a couple scenes that were using the "Focus" mode, such as the first large bridge sequence near the end (the one after the rotation is a manually controlled flight).
Granted they is a fair bit of post-processing in the clips stringed together, it was nice to be able to just go back and see what I could push. I didn't record any of these with the intention of putting them together so hopefully second round works well.
What I like about the general settings in Litchi is that the white balance mode does have some presets already made as opposed to strictly relying on the kelvin values. But at the same time, I wish basic exposure control was as direct as it is on the DJI Fly app to just tap and change the ISO/Shutter in the corner on the screen rather than tap into the quick menu, then exposure, then the dialog.
Saturation, Contrast, Sharpness
What I did like seeing was that I could change the saturation, contrast, and sharpness of both video and photos (from -3 to +3 range), since the camera on the mini doesn't seem that great to begin with, at least for video I could least pull back on any destruction of some detail by reducing a little bit of the saturation or contrast. It's not much, but helped in my case.
Focus Mode
The "focus" mode is probably the closest I could find to what would be a POI mode, and while it does seem to work, I didn't care for how jerky it's rotation adjustments seemed on the drone itself. Instead of smoothly staying horizontally fixed to the designated point it seems to drift a little, and then quickly re-adjust the viewpoint quite noticeably, and short of speed of flight, I could do that smoother manually.
The gimbal tilt seems to track very smooth and well though, so my thoughts on future flights is that I could turn off aircraft rotation, and just let the gimbal be controlled automatically since that's usually where I have the most trouble when controlling all three.
I haven't tried Follow/Orbit (points towards your GPS location of your device), as I'm not usually going to be doing that, and it seems from other video demos I've seen, to sort of lag here and there instead of staying with a target smoothly (probably due to the wide margin of GPS accuracy?). Likewise I haven't really tested the tracking (visual target, like active track), but I know it works, but can lose the target pretty easily, much like losing the target in quickshot if you start moving (it'll still try, but isn't hard to lose as it won't move out of its path to rotate).
Panaoramic Mode
I'm still getting used to this one as I'm used to visually finding landmarks in the frame and overlapping at that point, but it definitely does work for the intended purpose. I just have to figure out how many colums/rows are appropriate for narrower compositions (as there's no sense in doing 35+ shots for an area that's only going to yield a 30 megapixel result that could have been done in half the frames). The maximum vertical degree I would set being 85° (guessing within the 20 degree upward, down to I think 90 degree down if I remember correctly)
A 360 degree example (which does show up on facebook as such when changing the EXIF to think its a Richo Theta S)
180 degree example (best I can recall)
A narrower field of view with 24 shots resulting in a 28 megapixel stitch.
In the video clips I took at various locations, I mainly grabbed clips using reduced saturation, contrast, and sharpness to allow for some of that minor tweaking in Davinci Resolve Studio (granted the camera as I stated before isn't that great, so I imagine it's only a minor benefit), with a couple scenes that were using the "Focus" mode, such as the first large bridge sequence near the end (the one after the rotation is a manually controlled flight).
Granted they is a fair bit of post-processing in the clips stringed together, it was nice to be able to just go back and see what I could push. I didn't record any of these with the intention of putting them together so hopefully second round works well.
What I like about the general settings in Litchi is that the white balance mode does have some presets already made as opposed to strictly relying on the kelvin values. But at the same time, I wish basic exposure control was as direct as it is on the DJI Fly app to just tap and change the ISO/Shutter in the corner on the screen rather than tap into the quick menu, then exposure, then the dialog.
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