FlightPlan issues and others questions about video on panning, hovering, CameraMan

[fischerfoto]

Hi!

Today I tested my first FlightPlan on a river bank near my Office, the result is the video bellow. I upload the original file without any processing to maintain it the purest possible...

First Question: In the 30 seconds mark the drone makes two violent moves to the left, but there isn't nothing on flightplan and the drone was supposed to start turning right in this part because my POI is the rounded glass restaurant in that side. Anyone have an idea what can cause it? The wind was light, about 10km/h with 13-14km/h gusts. It's a flightplan bug or Anafi misbehaving?

Second Question: Is normal the drone make a pause on every waypoint? My drone stops, changes thhe direction of the move and start moving again. The same with speed and flight height changes. I tought that the drone should blend the instructions, changing height, direction, heading, gimbal angle and speed as it moves from one waypoint to another... I'm wrong?

Third Question: I was recording in 1080p30 non-HDR and no 1x zoom. All my panning movements get choppy and the horizontal lines shows a strong tearing like when playing games with V-Sync disabled, Is this normal with Anafi? At 4 minute mark is awfull. How your footage in same conditions?

Bonus Question 1: CameraMan mode failing to maintain the frame on the boat, this happens with everything, even on big constrasty targets, the frame moves to other place and loose the track. It's that hard to make CameraMan mode work?

Bonus Question 2: Anafi wandering when it should only rover in place, only gimbal being controlled (no commands applied to make any horizontal moviment). How yours Anafi's keep position?

Bonus Question 3: The drone cannot maintain altitude without oscilation on height on descending to landing point, only auto landing in place at the time. On landing it almost hit the ground and after it climbs as high as 4m to get low again, even when the drone is no more than 40cm from the ground, the interface show 2-3m. Last day the Anafi just hit hard the ground when landing and take-off again out of control unitl it landed again some 3 meters from the original landing point... You Anafi make the same?



VIDEOS
FlightPlan

CameraMan

Hovering

Descending

 

[AugerIn]

I wanna say the quick left looks were probably gusts of wind. The forecast might say 15km/h gusts, but sometimes it’ll gust a bit harder, or just get you at a certain angle or change directions just right. The higher you go of course the more wind there is, but also neat bodies of water you have cool air meeting warm, making more wind/turbulence and sometimes near rows of buildings or in canyons you get a natural funneling of the wind, amplifying breezes into stronger winds.

Hovering in place is hard to do with just gps/glonass, any little breeze will shove the drone slightly, and the resolution based on satellite signals alone is measured in meters still. Luckily the consistancy of the signal matters more than the accuracy, so it’s usually pretty stable minute to minute, but there are limitations to how still a drone can stay based on that alone. The drone has a downward ultrasonic sensor, which will help it maintain hover altitude down low, but doesn’t do anything for drifting left/right/fore/aft. The lighter the drone the worse this kind of drift will be.

The follow me and cameraman mode I think are tuned to expect smaller objects, somewhere between person sized and car sized. I’ve had great luck following people and cars, but trouble with small and fast moving objects, or weird shapes. With no depth perception, you’re relying solely on image processing to identify an object, and what looks outwardly obvious to us as a simple thing can easily confuse an ai tasked with identifying something, especially if it was trained to expect one range of things then is given a task outside it’s normal range of inputs. Luckily, this kind of thing can be improved upon with software updates. Also, the power of the phone in use has a good deal to do with how quickly it can process updates and recognize an image as an object.

Not sure what you meant by oscillating during landing? Like when it’s close to landing and kinda fights not to touch the ground? I’m most often hand catching when landing.

 

[AugerIn]

Just rereading about landing again, I wonder if this is the drone being confused about it’s altitude at takeoff, gps lock isn’t 100% yet, and by the time you’re landing it’s got a better read on it but thinks it has further to go to get back to the erroneous takeoff altitude? ultrasonic sensor will try and prevent hitting the ground if it can.

Like I said, I usually manually hover in place and grab.

 

[Landbo]

Hi!

Today I tested my first FlightPlan on a river bank near my Office, the result is the video bellow. I upload the original file without any processing to maintain it the purest possible...

First Question: In the 30 seconds mark the drone makes two violent moves to the left, but there isn't nothing on flightplan and the drone was supposed to start turning right in this part because my POI is the rounded glass restaurant in that side. Anyone have an idea what can cause it? The wind was light, about 10km/h with 13-14km/h gusts. It's a flightplan bug or Anafi misbehaving?

Second Question: Is normal the drone make a pause on every waypoint? My drone stops, changes thhe direction of the move and start moving again. The same with speed and flight height changes. I tought that the drone should blend the instructions, changing height, direction, heading, gimbal angle and speed as it moves from one waypoint to another... I'm wrong?

Third Question: I was recording in 1080p30 non-HDR and no 1x zoom. All my panning movements get choppy and the horizontal lines shows a strong tearing like when playing games with V-Sync disabled, Is this normal with Anafi? At 4 minute mark is awfull. How your footage in same conditions?

General: First of all, you seemed to fly very fast sometime. Try to slow down to max 3 m/s. You multiply the number in m/s with 3.6 to get the speed into km/h.
If I count correctly, you have 4 POI in your flight plan, is that correct?

Question 1: The turn is not normal. It's not the wind that has to blame since Anafi can easily handle the wind you're flying in here. Bug in FlightPlan software is an option or you have put 2 waypoints almost above each other ? I do not think it is due to a malfunction in Anafi.

Question 2: Yes unfortunately, Anafi stops at each waypoint. I think the behavior is a bug in FlightPlan that makes it unusual for movie tasks. Use Litchi and yours DJI drones instat.

Question 3: As I can see, your horizon is crooked already at takeoff. Your gimbal/camera needs to be calibrated. You must use the procedure described in the english manual. It is necessary you are very careful with the procedure.

Regards Leif.

 

[Landbo]

Bonus Question 1: CameraMan mode failing to maintain the frame on the boat, this happens with everything, even on big constrasty targets, the frame moves to other place and loose the track. It's that hard to make CameraMan mode work?

Bonus Question 2: Anafi wandering when it should only rover in place, only gimbal being controlled (no commands applied to make any horizontal moviment). How yours Anafi's keep position?

Bonus Question 3: The drone cannot maintain altitude without oscilation on height on descending to landing point, only auto landing in place at the time. On landing it almost hit the ground and after it climbs as high as 4m to get low again, even when the drone is no more than 40cm from the ground, the interface show 2-3m. Last day the Anafi just hit hard the ground when landing and take-off again out of control unitl it landed again some 3 meters from the original landing point... You Anafi make the same?

Bonus 1: CameraMan works incredibly well for me. You may properly need to be a bit more careful with the sticks when you start your CameraMan ?

Bonus 2: Similarly. Anafi actually has an optical flow camera underneath. I heard an employee in Parrot say that after the next firmware update it should work properly.

Bonus 3: Yes and no. My Anafi keeps its height within + 50 cm, provided no strong wind is blowing. An ultrasound sensor is also located below Anafi. It is the one who controls Anafi's height when it flies under 5-6 meters. I would think/guess that Parrot also will look at its function before the next firmware is released !!!

Bonus bonus 3: If you are having trouble Anafi will not land within + - 1 meter from the place you had takeoff, you have probably not had a proper GPS lock. Wait with takeoff until the GPS mark for Anafi in FreeFligth 6 has been green for 15 seconds.

Regards Leif.

 

[AugerIn]

Have you guys tried the automatic progressive waypoints off?

I’ve only been using flightplan with freeflightpro and a disco, but their description from when they introduced it to freeflight 3 said how it smooths out cornering transitions.

Does it hesitate at waypoints if you’re using a POI to have the camera face continually in one direction?

 

[fischerfoto]

Hi!

I'll try to reply to everyone in just one post

Backgroung: This is my third "big" drone. I already have two DJI Drones: Spark and Mavic Pro. I never take-off without a preflight checklist that involves checking the camera horizontal calibration, GPS lock on both controller/aircraft and signal noise/interference... Only after checking this itens I an allowed to take-off.


About Question 1: I made a hard reset following Parrot's Tech Support. Planning a new mission to try.

About Question 2: I made another plan, just arround my condo and it keeps pausing on every POI transition, video bellow. I'll look into @AugerIn idea and change the option in "Automaticac Progressive Run" .

About Question 3: Still cannot find a good paning speed to not make the video looks awfull when dealing with Yaw :-(

About Bonus Question 1: I have tried with a lot of subjects and always the CameraMan loses track on smal drone moviments. Doesn't matter if the target is static or moving, if it's big or small. I've seen a lot of Youtube videos where the CameraMan can track a flag, pole, landscape without makor tracking issues. I just can't get this mode to work in a usefull way.

About Bonus Question 2: Waiting for this firmware update! The hovering after take-off is a shame even for cheaper and smaller drones like DJI Spark have a much better hover. With Anafy, I take-off and, without touching the lateral/frontal sticks, the drone starts to drift a lot, and if I make the drone Yaw, not only it drifts but climbs too, it just can't stay put :-(

About Bonus Question 3: I've noted that my Anafi has two issues regarding height. It's go up and down when hovering, shows incorrect altitude when bellow 5m, even indicanting 3m when is almost touching the ground. I observed that when descending to land, the drone makes a sudden drop about 10m until almost 2-3m away from the ground and fight to stop after this drop. In one situation, it just hit the ground as it failled to detect the height and after the collision with the grass the drone keep flying and drifited a lot, stunned from the shock and after some seconds, stopped and landed as if not have happened, even one landing feet got out of place and I have to loosen the leg screws and pop it in place againg, fastening the screws to make everything firmly assembled. Yours Anafi make that drop when landing, too?

 

[fischerfoto]

New Flightplan test: It was winding, with occasional gusts and the sun have set already, but apart from the pauses on POI changing, everything looks OK on my opinion...

 

[Landbo]

I've found a clip where I'm just playing with my toy and among others using the first version of CameraMan along with 1-2.8x zoom over a small high with 4 stones on top. I'm using the stone as my locking point. It is very clear to see where the CameraMan is in use (do not get dizzy).

Dropbox - VV_test_Anafi_0.mp4

The clip is in 1080p and recoded from 30 Mb/s to 16 Mb/s to reduce the size (14 min). PSE download the clip for best quality as it seems that DropBox reduces the resolution to 720p in their viewer.

By the way, what phone/tablet do you use with Anafi ? If it is too slow, it may affect the performance of CameraMan in a negative direction.

Regards Leif.

 

[fischerfoto]

I've found a clip where I'm just playing with my toy and among others using the first version of CameraMan along with 1-2.8x zoom over a small high with 4 stones on top. I'm using the stone as my locking point. It is very clear to see where the CameraMan is in use (do not get dizzy).

Dropbox - VV_test_Anafi_0.mp4

The clip is in 1080p and recoded from 30 Mb/s to 16 Mb/s to reduce the size (14 min). PSE download the clip for best quality as it seems that DropBox reduces the resolution to 720p in their viewer.

By the way, what phone/tablet do you use with Anafi ? If it is too slow, it may affect the performance of CameraMan in a negative direction.

Regards Leif.

Reading other places and topics, looks like there is a relation between the track modes on Anafi and iPhone X, I found more people with similar issues with this combination...

About the video quality, any tip to reduce the tearing when paning?