I wanted to share something a bit different from a regular drone video - a Mini 5 Pro hyperlapse that went completely wrong... and then turned into one of my VFX experiments.
This started as a simple Litchi mission for a day-to-night hyperlapse over Montreal.
But wind drift and slight waypoint differences between the day and night flights made it impossible to align - every frame was off.
Instead of giving up, I rebuilt both shots using a full VFX pipeline:
Mission planning & preview in Google Earth Pro
Photogrammetry reconstruction in RealityCapture using GPS and camera metadata
Extended the city mesh & rebuilt geometry
Smoothed camera motion in Maya / Blender
Projection & cleanup in Nuke / DaVinci Fusion
Final grade and assembly in DaVinci Resolve
Here’s the 1 minute teaser video showing the result and some behind-the-scenes frames:
If you’d like to see the full tutorial series showing every step - from Litchi flight planning to photogrammetry, projection, and grading
Please drop a like and comment “VFX Series” here or on YouTube.
That’s how I’ll decide whether to start publishing the full breakdowns!
Hope you enjoy it - I’d love to hear what you think about merging drone cinematography with VFX techniques like this and also if anyone else experienced waypoints hyperlapse path drift with pretty calm wind like 4 m/s.
This started as a simple Litchi mission for a day-to-night hyperlapse over Montreal.
But wind drift and slight waypoint differences between the day and night flights made it impossible to align - every frame was off.
Instead of giving up, I rebuilt both shots using a full VFX pipeline:
Mission planning & preview in Google Earth Pro Photogrammetry reconstruction in RealityCapture using GPS and camera metadata Extended the city mesh & rebuilt geometry Smoothed camera motion in Maya / Blender Projection & cleanup in Nuke / DaVinci Fusion Final grade and assembly in DaVinci ResolveHere’s the 1 minute teaser video showing the result and some behind-the-scenes frames:
If you’d like to see the full tutorial series showing every step - from Litchi flight planning to photogrammetry, projection, and grading
Please drop a like and comment “VFX Series” here or on YouTube.
That’s how I’ll decide whether to start publishing the full breakdowns!
Hope you enjoy it - I’d love to hear what you think about merging drone cinematography with VFX techniques like this and also if anyone else experienced waypoints hyperlapse path drift with pretty calm wind like 4 m/s.
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