Vertical Studio - Looking for Beta Testers

[apprentice]

I was just looking for an app that would allow me to track skiers while skiing. Really looking forward to try it. Hope to get it before the winter ends

 

[Neil Mathew]

I film allot of road cycling groups and single riders through wide open to closed in areas, having the camera follow the subject while I fly will greatly shorten the "retakes" to get the footage required. During the winter months (Ontario,Canada) I film ice sailing boats across the frozen lakes, as they travel very fast and taking one of the tasks away from piloting will "I think" greatly help. However If..... one day we could program this to follow a subject for a selected time frame (i.e. 3minutes or 7 minutes..etc) and at user random elevations selected between say 40-70 feet or 100-150 ft , etc. This would be "over the top" for my imagination in filming.

Well that's a nice surprise. We're from Waterloo, Ontario! Do you have any videos of the ice sailing boats handy ? I'd love to see them - they sound amazing! That's a really good use case but I don't quite understand what you mean by random elevations selected - do you mean keep changing the elevation along the flight path at timed intervals ? Interesting feature - no one has ever asked me that before, so I was to get more info.

Thanks!

 

[Neil Mathew]

I signed up but haven't received a email yet

What is your email address ? I may not have gotten to your email address yet. We didn't expect so many signups but we're reaching over 800 now. You'll get an email from me soon but if you DM me your email I can tell you if you haven't gotten an email from me yet or if we've missed each other because of spam or something else..

Thanks!

 

[Neil Mathew]

Hi
I have signed up too and no email , should I wait or move on and forget about it

Thanks for your patience! Definitely wait a little more if you signed up for Android I'm just going through the list of signups on a first come, first download basis due to the closed nature of the beta test. If you DM me your email address I can tell if you haven't received an email because of an error or because I haven't reached you yet.
Cheers!

 

[Neil Mathew]

Boy am I glad I bumped into this thread. Signed up for android.
I presume if you zoom in on something the s/w gradually rewrites the definition.. so if you aim for a person, say, that's a dot to begin with, it doesn't get confused and drop the subject at some point. A bit like your zoom out but in reverse?

That's right! The machine learning algorithms rewrite what you looks like about 30 times a second so as long as you don't move super fast it will work! There's definitely some limitations on the range of motion but if you see the video @DownUnder posted earlier you'll get a sense for when the tracking works and when it has a hard time.

 

[Neil Mathew]

I imagine this probably would be almost impossible to accomplish smoothly. When you see video of military bombing runs where they have passed the target you see that mechanical rotation. If they can't get a smooth rotation with the technology available to them, who can? The extreme angle change and the speed with which it needs to happen is the problem.

I would have no problem with the app controlling yaw and would almost expect that you would need to do that as a matter of course.

So there's definitely ways to do this. The main problem is that when you go directly under something, picking which direction to turn it easy because your subject will either be slightly to the left or slightly to the right. But as the passing distance from the center of the frame gets smaller, the gain on the yaw is so slow that the controller just can't keep up in time and then it realizes it's lagging only when it's too late. We can certainly do something smarter because we know the angle of the gimbal and we could force the turn sooner. It'll take some experimentation but I'm glad you brought this up because you'd be the perfect person to test it.

 

[Neil Mathew]

There are other great use cases for Public Safety here. Tracking objects and persons of interest. I would be interested in determining the ability to discriminate a particular person identified in a crowd, and the detection of an object entering or leaving a defined area. Outside of the UAV uses, there is considerable need for this intelligence in video surveillance and security platforms. Is you application adaptable outside the UAV space? Will be signing up to see how this handles some scenarios.

Thanks for your interest in security and surveillance systems! We've been approached by folks building security systems in the past but in the interest of staying focused and not drawing ourselves too thin we're sticking to software for aerial filming applications for the time being. That being said, if you email me at [email protected] we can chat about the other work we've been doing with machine learning based detection of people (without having to explicitly select someone) on UAVs.

 

[Neil Mathew]

I saw something similiar to this for the Parrot Bebop recently and was hoping to find something for the Phantom 3. Didn't think it would be this quick though. This certainly fills a gap in terms of closer tracking of a subject.

Looking forward to the beta if there is space or the finished product if not.

Absolutely, please sign up for either Android or iOS beta. You may not get the email immediately as you've noticed from some of the messages on the forum but trust that we're getting to you through the list and you'll be able to use the app soon (only android is available right now - iOS is coming shortly).

 

[Neil Mathew]

I was just looking for an app that would allow me to track skiers while skiing. Really looking forward to try it. Hope to get it before the winter ends

You bet Did you sign up for Android or iOS ? Also, I'm curious - what is the craziest shot you can imagine when filming a skiier?

 

[apprentice]

You bet Did you sign up for Android or iOS ? Also, I'm curious - what is the craziest shot you can imagine when filming a skiier?

I did it today. For iOS. Unfortunately I only noticed this thread at the Last week's most popular topics email which I received today.

 

[Dave Pitman]

Good idea! I'll send out an update email to all you iOS folks out there

Just checking if you have sent out the batch email acknowledging ios signup?

 

[DaveWithDrone]

Looks like a lot of fun to use. Looking forward to using it.

 

[Neil Mathew]

Just checking if you have sent out the batch email acknowledging ios signup?

Done and Done! You should receive one soon, and if you haven't received one within the next 30 minutes - check your spam or sign up for iOS again because you might have entered a wrong email address.

I'm now writing a little script to auto-send confirmations to all our signups from the Google Form we've been using so this will be automated in the future. Thanks for your patience! We really appreciate it

 

[Neil Mathew]

Looks like a lot of fun to use. Looking forward to using it.

Awesome! Thanks for signing up I hope you enjoy VS!

 

[Dave Pitman]

Done and Done! You should receive one soon, and if you haven't received one within the next 30 minutes - check your spam or sign up for iOS again because you might have entered a wrong email address.

I'm now writing a little script to auto-send confirmations to all our signups from the Google Form we've been using so this will be automated in the future. Thanks for your patience! We really appreciate it

Got it...Thanks

 

[olof Ekbergh]

I just resubmitted for IOS as I never got confirmation...

 

[matwelli]

Signed up. Looking forward to see how well it will track quad bikes. We just finished filming 6 races using dual operator on an inspire. Will be great to see if can get a similar result with tracking software

 

[schroeder1959]

Hi Phantom Pilots,

We’re Vertical, a start-up in the Bay Area and we're looking for beta testers for our app Vertical Studio.

One of our biggest problems with aerial video was that filming landscapes and panoramas is easy, but filming close-up shots of stuff in action is ridiculously complicated. Only the most professional studios with large drones and camera crews seem to be able to film those sweet complex action shots.

So we've built Vertical Studio. An app for DJI Phantom and Inspire that lets you film all those difficult tracking shots with a simple touch interface. How do we do it ? Well, we use some nifty computer vision software we’ve been building for over a year and pack it all into your Android or iOS device so you can auto-track anything your drone sees - without any GPS or tracking beacons. Just click on stuff in your video feed and let Vertical Studio handle the rest.

The best way to explain Vertical Studio is probably with this video.

If you’re interested in beta testing, we’d love it if you could head over to our website (Vertical - EPIC Aerial Filming) and take a minute to sign-up for either the Android or iOS beta. It will help us better manage our beta tests. The Android beta is available now, but the iOS beta should be ready in a few days.

Vertical Studio is compatible with DJI Phantom 3 (Pro, Advanced) and DJI Inspire.

And if you have any questions or initial thoughts about Vertical Studio, do let us know in the forum or email us at [email protected].

Cheers!
Neil
www.vertical.ai

Just signed up, this looks very interesting! Does it coincide with the DJI GO app? Hope to hear from you soon!

 

[Neil Mathew]

I just resubmitted for IOS as I never got confirmation...

Great You should receive a confirmation email in the next 30 minutes. If you don't email me at [email protected] and I can manually check your registration.

 

[Neil Mathew]

Signed up. Looking forward to see how well it will track quad bikes. We just finished filming 6 races using dual operator on an inspire. Will be great to see if can get a similar result with tracking software

That's awesome. Riding a quad bike with a drone following me is my dream haha. I'd love to get your thoughts on the comparisons between dual operator mode and Vertical Studio for the Inspire. I don't expect it to replace the creative vision of a camera operator but I think it can help you better execute on your own ideas when flying alone.