Abandoned Building - Critique Appreciated

athearnsd45 · May 12, 2019

This isn't sweeping ocean views or breathtaking mountains, but it is an interesting subject beyond what you see at first glance. Believe it or not, the building in my video is abandoned and will shortly be torn down. The motive for my video is a before-during-after sequence of the demolition process; this is the first stage in the sequence. Since I have my Part 107 but haven't used it for any money-making projects, I figured I'd use this as a testbed for how a commercial shoot might go (no plans to do anything with this particular video, but it's good practice). Any comments on my flying, editing, etc. will be appreciated, particularly new things I could be trying to make things more interesting. The drone is a Phantom 4 Advanced.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can give me.

John

WV. Rootman · May 13, 2019

I love your smooth flying. The one main thing I see is, this is good raw footage. Your main presentation should be at least half the time length to keep someone's attention. I know it's all good footage. By making it shorter you will have the best of the best. Leave people wanting more, not I had enough. Just like speakers, they talk too long. They get up to the mike and think it's all important. If you were forced to do 2 minutes, it would be much better.

DroneB · May 13, 2019

Nice smooth flying. I try to keep all videos between 1-2 minutes, otherwise the audience gets bored. Individual clips limited to 10-15 seconds. Perhaps in post processing, speed up the clips just a bit, turn down the exposure and maybe add a little more tint. Nice job on the transitions.

gudgeman · May 13, 2019

I agree with the above comments- very well flown, no major pixelation issues- nice angles- didn’t hear any music - looks like right off the camera raw- could use some color grading- shorten it up (that’s the absolute hardest thing for me too!)
keep at it - best hobby in the world

2edgesword · May 13, 2019

I agree with the smooth flying and I liked the speed, not to fast but not to slow. The orbiting was also very smooth. The build at least from the outside looks if very good shape and this would have been a good promotional video for selling it. It seems a tremendous shame to tear it down so I'm hoping there is something phenomenal in the places for using the property. Actually, do you know what they will be doing with the property.

NM_Quad · May 13, 2019

Nice smooth video and views. As others have said, about 3-min. has been proven to be the length to hold most people's attention.

That is a fairly large building complex that looks fairly new and modern with grounds well kept. Why are they tearing it down? Seems a shame.

athearnsd45 · May 15, 2019

I appreciate the feedback - I can definitely get this down shorter; my motive here was to try to replicate maybe something that would be akin to a promo video for the facility vs. something that would be interesting for the average viewer. It's also not quite "Raw" footage, as I did edit out a lot to get down to this. I did not, however, fiddle with color balance, levels, etc.

Thanks also for the comments on the smoothness, as this is an area I've been trying to improve on. In fact, the orbit sequence is the first time I've tried to hand-fly an orbit, and I was pretty happy how it turned out. I do need to adjust the control sensitivity on my Phantom, as it has a bit of a hair trigger and the slightest control input produces a large effect in flight.

As for the building, it's sadly reflective of the business climate here in Connecticut. The building was until a few years ago the research & development facility for a major pharmaceutical company. They retrenched to a central location outside Connecticut, leaving the building behind. The building owner realizes that the potential for attracting a new customer to a building of this size is zero. Property taxes are very high here, so by tearing the building down, they will substantially lower their tax bill while they explore options for the site. They wanted to put warehouses on it, but the town denied the application.

Deleted member 108945 · May 16, 2019

It's a nice video but it has a lot of things that could be improved, so I'm going to be much more critical than others have been with the previous comments.

- The first thing that pops up is that it's too long and repetitive. You have been given good advice on this but I would like to add that you should try to record at different heights, camera angles, distance to the building, close-ups, ...etc. I'm missing a lot gimbal movement and close-ups of details / parts of the building. If I had to edit a video with your scenes, I wouldn't do it longer than 1 minute since all the scenes are almost the same (same altitude, same camera angle, same framing of the subject, ...).

- Your flight is smooth, it has no erratic movements but is not perfect: many of the scenes need stabilization to eliminate small jumps in turns (for example, 0:50, 0:55, 1:01, ....).

- The colors are too soft and the light is not uniform throughout the video (for example, at 2:04 it is slightly overexposed).

- I also have the feeling that the horizon is tilted in several scenes, for example to 2:04

- Why doesn't it have music?

- Why not upload it to 4K?

Again, it's nice but at the same time boring. It can be much improved

Deleted member 108945 · May 16, 2019

I'm trying to give you an example of what I mentioned above, in the form of a video although it is far from perfect, especially in the colors and light. It's a video of a single small subject, without nothing too much interesting around it. Here`s the link of the post where I published it

athearnsd45 · May 17, 2019

Thanks, eutx9795, this is the kind of feedback I'm soliciting and is appreciated.

To address the points:
Length: Easy fix on my part.

Smoothness: Agreed, I really need to tweak my controls so they're not so sensitive. The slightest touch causes a large reaction on the drone.

Colors/light: This one is more complicated. I undertook my flight under what I consider ideal conditions; late in the day and not a cloud in the sky. Do you normally adjust colors in post-processing, or try to get it right on the drone? I believe I have my white balance set to auto and color to D-Cinelike. The overexposure is user error and can again be fixed by undertaking the flight again - is it too blown to fix in post, do you think?

Tilted horizon: This issue has dogged me since I accidentally hit the adjustment wheel awhile back (I use Litchi). I find the Litchi horizon control to be clunky, and tried adjusting using DJI GO4 - does the DJI setting "stick" when switching back to Litchi?

Music: For a finished product, I would put music in place. I was concentrating more on the video aspect in this exercise.

4K: Does YouTube even support 4K? I guess I've been trying to keep the file size manageable at 1080px, but there's no reason I can't shoot 4K.

Thanks again for the feedback, very useful.

Nightwolf · May 17, 2019

eutx9795 said:
you should try to record at different heights

This would help a lot

NM_Quad said:
about 3-min. has been proven to be the length to hold most people's attention.

LOL 3:05 actually

"If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit / So they cut it down to 3:05" Billy Joel
little known fact: Purple Haze was originally 26 minutes long

Deleted member 108945 · May 18, 2019

athearnsd45 said:
Thanks, eutx9795, this is the kind of feedback I'm soliciting and is appreciated.

To address the points:
Length: Easy fix on my part.

Smoothness: Agreed, I really need to tweak my controls so they're not so sensitive. The slightest touch causes a large reaction on the drone.

Colors/light: This one is more complicated. I undertook my flight under what I consider ideal conditions; late in the day and not a cloud in the sky. Do you normally adjust colors in post-processing, or try to get it right on the drone? I believe I have my white balance set to auto and color to D-Cinelike. The overexposure is user error and can again be fixed by undertaking the flight again - is it too blown to fix in post, do you think?

Tilted horizon: This issue has dogged me since I accidentally hit the adjustment wheel awhile back (I use Litchi). I find the Litchi horizon control to be clunky, and tried adjusting using DJI GO4 - does the DJI setting "stick" when switching back to Litchi?

Music: For a finished product, I would put music in place. I was concentrating more on the video aspect in this exercise.

4K: Does YouTube even support 4K? I guess I've been trying to keep the file size manageable at 1080px, but there's no reason I can't shoot 4K.

Thanks again for the feedback, very useful.

I correct colors on post-production as I used to shoot on dlog, with all camera settings on manual. I think you can correct clips overexposed on your video on post, they're not too much overexposed.

You can also correct tilted clips on post, just rotate them and zoom until black borders disappear. I cannot answer your question about Litchi as I haven't used it

Youtube accepts 4K. If your computer is not enough powerful to handle 4K clips, you can edit them using proxy files and make the final render with real clips.

But again, the main problem of your video is the lack of diversity of different camera angles, framing, highs, gimbal movements, closeups shoots,....

Wishing to watch an improved version

LarBear360 · May 18, 2019

Forget the video. I want to fly there, too.

furthertofly · May 18, 2019

Curious as to why you call it "abandoned"? It seems to be a multimillion $ corporate HQ type facility that is currently unoccupied. Undoubtedly there is a sales/leasing agent somewhere who is seriously trying to fill it and would make a huge amount of money doing so. Such an agent probably has aerial footage of the site already but you could always inquire and see if there is a business opportunity there....

MrMagus · May 18, 2019

Nice work - I appreciate a video that is smooth and easy to watch. What post production software are you using?

WV. Rootman · May 18, 2019

furthertofly said:
Curious as to why you call it "abandoned"? It seems to be a multimillion $ corporate HQ type facility that is currently unoccupied. Undoubtedly there is a sales/leasing agent somewhere who is seriously trying to fill it and would make a huge amount of money doing so. Such an agent probably has aerial footage of the site already but you could always inquire and see if there is a business opportunity there....

You are thinking too logically. They do it all the time. I worked at a state of the art semiconductor plant. We made the chip that did away with the antennas on your cellphone. We had 2 presidents and many senators visited the place. They shut it down and out soursed everything to Singapore because they couldn't make it on a 100 million profit.

dkeberhardt · May 18, 2019

This building is being torn down? Wow- it looks pretty new. The video watching choices were 1080P60 and 720P60 which both were jittery on the computer here at work. At home no problem since I have a high end computer with a 2K monitor. I wonder how many people who watch online have crappy computers to watch videos on and might have same issue? 30fps looks just fine most of the time for YouTube in my opinion.

dkeberhardt · May 18, 2019

oh, do a gimbal calibration prior to flight until things improve. I had the tilted horizon problem on my P4P but it has gotten better over time (for some unknown reason)

furthertofly · May 18, 2019

WV. Rootman said:
You are thinking too logically. They do it all the time. I worked at a state of the art semiconductor plant. We made the chip that did away with the antennas on your cellphone. We had 2 presidents and many senators visited the place. They shut it down and out soursed everything to Singapore because they couldn't make it on a 100 million profit.

Yes, buildings change occupants all the time, but that is not "abandoned." Abandoned means it will never be occupied again; you could show up and write graffitti and break windows and no one would care; squatters could set up housekeeping and not get evicted; some day it will burn down or get bulldozed. Is that what you mean?

WV. Rootman · May 18, 2019

furthertofly said:
Yes, buildings change occupants all the time, but that is not "abandoned." Abandoned means it will never be occupied again; you could show up and write graffitti and break windows and no one would care; squatters could set up housekeeping and not get evicted; some day it will burn down or get bulldozed. Is that what you mean?

Yep, the most modern,6 three story beautiful buildings plus power plant and water treatment plant bulldozed to the ground.