More than disappointed this morning

robport · Nov 11, 2018

I went out to film the sunrise this morning. It was about 38 degrees F and the sun was coming up in 8 minutes. Had the Anafi up in the air over the water with an exceptional scene starting. I switched to HDR mode to try to remove the blowout from the sky. A few minutes later, phone app shows red strip along bottom "Vertical camera failure, contact Parrot Customer support" Video was frozen after that. I brought it down, and the clouds turned purple with gold tinges and God rays streaming through...truly beautiful. I got the first video off the craft, after I drove back home. The second (HDR part) just left two files, an MP4 with 0 bytes in it and a 2.3 gig temp file, both named the same.

I'm assuming I should call Parrot about the camera, but does anyone know if the video on the card is save-able?

I've been very happy with it so far, but after this morning, I'm a little nervous about keeping it.

robport · Nov 11, 2018

Should have searched first...see I'm not the only one. I ran into the camera yaw instability problem in low light and also a horizon problem. I'm rendering a minute of that and hopefully, Parrot can get some useful info from it. Something I can add to the knowledgebase though: I made a copy of the the large .tmp file and simply renamed it to the same name.mp4. I could read it after that. I'll try the drone again later, upload the video to Youtube and update.

Dirk_ANAFI · Nov 11, 2018

The "vertical camera failure" is possibly related to the last firmware update.
Read HERE.

robport · Nov 11, 2018

Interesting, it also has a yaw problem that I believe people were talking about (although not as pronounced) and it kept losing the horizon (camera tilt). Wind, by the way, was about 5 knots and steady, from the left front corner of the craft. For most of the video, I didn't touch the left stick at all. On a positive note though, the HDR really brings out the video in those lower light conditions (before sunrise) and it flew fine and landed safely. It was also very easy to recover the corrupted video which is good. My problem is that I won't really be able to test it much for a few weeks though, which is not comforting.