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Pro When a Failed Drone Hyperlapse Becomes a VFX Sequence

trisen1981

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Joined
Dec 26, 2024
Messages
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Age
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Location
Montréal, QC, CAN
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:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

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 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 km/h
 
Last edited:
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:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

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 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 km/h
WOW you totally dazzled me. Kind of neat to watch.
 
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Reactions: trisen1981
The first episode, Part 1: Mission Planning with Litchi, is now available on my YouTube channel.

In this episode, I walk through the complete Litchi App + Google Earth Pro + Litchi Hub + custom python script workflow for planning precise missions.

Watch here

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For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 

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