After three years of bringing a drone to my now yearly Tarn excursion with the Göttinger university, I finally managed to capture some shots I’m satisfied with :). Please avoid to watch the video on a smartphone, it wasn’t made for that.
About the making of this edit
Fortunately, I experienced no drone crash in my previous Tarn trips. However, shots were usually far from usable as can be seen with the following “majestic” shot.
Here, the gimbal (the motors “stabilizing” the camera) went crazy during a flight back in 2015.
Or how about this nice shot from 2016.
This time, the vibrations of the custom made drone lead to a special “jello” effect and the blades of the drones created weird shadows when flying against the sun.
The drones themselves were plagued with other annoying issues, like having to recalibrate the compass before each new flight, i.e. having to rotate the drone 360 degrees along the horizontal and vertical axis before take-off, or the batteries lasting only about six minutes.
To avoid the previous setbacks, I managed to take not one but two new drones with me this year: a DJI Phantom 4 and a DJI Inspire 1 (borrowed from a friend). While this time both drones were able to produce somewhat smooth shots and flew between 20 and 25 minutes, the experience was still far from perfect. I had a live video feedback during the flight but I was usually out in bright daylight and couldn’t see much on the tablet I was using. (A solution for that would be either a 500 Euro VR headset or a 1000 Euro super bright custom screen.) Additionally, the controls for both drones were – even at their “optimal” settings – far too sensitive for most “cinematic” filming operations. When flying through a narrow canyon, I’m not particularly interested in fast accelerations… Especially annoying is also the fact that the gimbal can’t pan smoothly, i.e. horizontal left / right movement with the camera are almost always too rapid… (Something you might notice in the final video.)
Nevertheless, I’m quite satisfied with the result this time. The film was cut from about two dozen flights with a total of about six hours of 4k raw footage taken over the period of ten days. The editing took about 40 hours.
Bonus: 4K is equivalent to 12 mega pixel video; this means that screengrabs can lead to quite good pictures, c.f. Flickr album below.
Gordon Schücker 