Time lapse 1st attempt

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my 1st attempt and both a time lapse and a sunset unfortunately battwries were too low to finish.

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Hey there ! Really nice spot you have there, the reflected sky on the ground/water is awesome !

I've been thinking alot about drone timelapses in the past few weeks, but in the end I'm not sure drones are fitted for that.

In my opinion your video is great and I don't think you are doing anything wrong - the thing is in the actual state of technology, batteries just can't stand long enought to do proper timelapse on a drone.
I've been doing timelapses with DSLRs for a few years now, and I recently got a P4P, but i'm really not feeling like doing timelapses with it for the moment.

In order to get a good "timelapse" effect, most of the time you need to stay as long as you can, and take only a few photos every minutes.
This is mostly true for long ranged horizon with clouds - from our perspective, they often move really slowly, and you need to stay a while to get things moving fast on the final video.

Of course there is cases where the wind is strong and clouds move faster, so you can reduce the shooting period and take more shots every minutes.
But those situation might not be the easiest to deal with while using a drone...

Also the "timelapse" effect is often stronger with perfect stable camera, or really smooth linear movements - and I think our birds aren't quite stable enought. On DJI drones, the camera stabilisation is astonishing for filming videos, but the drone still always ends up having small movements, especially over long periods of time (several minutes), and those are really visible in the final video.

In your video, the effect is not very intense and seems more like an accelerated video than an actual timelapse, and because the "frame" is moving a lot while the drone fly around, the sense of passing time is less strong. I'm curious about how you took the shoots. Did you used a video feed that you sped up, or a series of photos that you assembled into a video at 24fps ?

I'm not saying it's impossible to do timelapses with the drone, but in my opinion there is so much more to do with drones that I can't imagine wasting my flight time for timelapses.

Instead, when I'm going out for a flight session, I also bring my DSLR camera with a tripod, and shoot the timelapse with it !
Then I can enjoy my drone to make full 360 panospheres, take beautiful still from many angles, or shoot awesome 4k 60fps videos !

Anyway, I still think that if you keep going on practicing this, you'll end up doing awesome videos !
Experience is the key and the more you'll practice, the easier it'll get !

Keep going
 
Hey !

Well I guess that using litchi or another autopilot app will indeed help a lot regarding the smoothness of the motion, but I think it won't prevent the bird to slightly move because of the winds.
But even if there is some small movements, you might be able to correct it and get a perfect stable video using stabilisation software (or builtin video editor plugin) !

For the moment i'm far to be confident enought to use "third party" apps, maily because i've read way too many threads about litchi crashes and stuff..!
For the moment i'd rather stick to using DJI apps.
The DJI GS pro app seems really nice, but it's only on iOS and I haven't got the chance to test it... I need to buy myself an apple tablet !

By the way, you haven't told me : Did you used a video feed that you sped up, or a series of photos that you assembled into a video at 24 frames per second ?

Both techniques are valid, but the result might be quite different !
Using a series of photos (in RAW format, DNG for our birds) give you way more latitude to edit the shoots in lightroom or camera raw (brightness, white balance, distorsions, colors, etc).
On the contrary, a video gives you way less room for editing, and correcting it is almost impossible (it's like trying to edit a JPEG) !

Fly safe
 
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