Do you use flight modes?

Do you use flight modes?

  • All the modes! All the time!

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Only a few are useful to me

    Votes: 6 46.2%
  • Never or almost never

    Votes: 7 53.8%

  • Total voters
    13
Joined
May 1, 2017
Messages
90
Reaction score
19
Age
47
Location
Oregon
I'm curious how many of you use the various flight modes. I admit, draw and tap fly sucked me in when I was drone shopping, but now I really don't find much use for them. I do use tripod and point-of-interest fairly often, but for my needs I can't say I've found other modes very useful. Draw would be more useful if I could use a top down map. I also have a P4P+, so I haven't considered Litchi, nor do I fly out of VLOS (not supposed to anyway when I'm working). Maybe it's just because I'm not shooting indie films or taking dronies of me racing my mountain bike. Most of the time I just fly.
 
Those various modes are specifically to suck people in, like happened to you. Most serious pilots don't use most of that stuff. If you're interested in plotting a course from the top down, you MUST get LItchi. You will love it. The mission hub lets you pre-determine your mission course from your home computer, save it, upload to the craft in the field, and fly it. It takes a while go gain your confidence in the product, but if you start small, and safe, you will grow into larger missions that can amaze you. The mission hub maps even provide you with MSL and relative elevation to first waypoint data, which is super helpful.
 
Token "Autopilot" alternative, too. They both (Litchi and AP) have strengths and weaknesses, on a whole Autopilot is far more powerful but with a steeper learning curve.

I use a lot more flight modes on Autopilot than I do on Go4 though. Pretty much use tripod only in Go4. But other modes even ActiveTrack are pretty much useless in my experience. AP can do any of them but better, and a lot more interestingly. And the Airspace functionality is so much fun to play with ... I did an autonomous following of a P3 recently. this weekend we're going to try a 3 bird AP autonomous train all following each other with the first bird autonomously following an airspace of my buddy on his motorcycle. [emoji106]).

Waypoint route planning is a lot of fun, too, whether you use AP, litchi, or FPV cam.
 
  • Like
Reactions: trevornewkirk
I get a big kick out of flying totally manual for most of my stuff! Thats the challenge for me with these machines tbo! I love trying to fly cinematic pleasing style with variety of video moves totally manual! Love Litchi for some things too. But not done that much with Litchi and P4P. Used it with my 2 P4's last year. It is def a challenge to fly super smooth stuff manually but it can be done. Practice is a must. EXP fine tuning is a must!
 
  • Like
Reactions: DaRana
that all having been said - got a good recommendation on the best 360° automated pano app? not digging Hangar 360. the resulting file is low-res and there’s no way to choose a higher resolution. and the app messes with the drone.

for instance - i used it recently to shoot the area surrounding a famous hotel in the mountains. it did it’s job, landed, etc. i turned off the craft and closed the app when it was done. i then opened the GO4 app and turned back on the P4P. i went and flew and took a whole bunch of beautiful still shots, landed and left.

it’s a 2 hour drive there and a 2 hour drive back to the hotel. i download all my shots of the day only to discover that all the shots i took AFTER the Hangar 360 pano were NEVER RECORDED to the SD card. i was so incredibly angry. the only thing i can think of is wondering if i power-cycled the transmitter. i don’t remember doing it or not doing it, and i don’t know if ultimately that was the problem...

so - tons of wasted time and i lost all my good shots. i’m done with that app and looking for something that does the same thing but *better*.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DaRana
I get a big kick out of flying totally manual for most of my stuff! Thats the challenge for me with these machines tbo! I love trying to fly cinematic pleasing style with variety of video moves totally manual! Love Litchi for some things too. But not done that much with Litchi and P4P. Used it with my 2 P4's last year. It is def a challenge to fly super smooth stuff manually but it can be done. Practice is a must. EXP fine tuning is a must!

Agreed, it is still a fun challenge. I've been doing a ton of practicing. Have you tried tinkering with fixed control orientations? For certain moves I find switching to an absolute bearing orientation works great. This is easier to activate in quickly in AutoPilot (maybe in Litchi?) than in Go4 where it is a dedicated flight mode. But for doing a slider type move with say a touch of yaw as you go past the POI, not having to add in a slow counteracting movement on the right stick is very helpful. I also have found that that right-stick counteracting doesn't seem to be completely reliable in that it can change the yaw speed sometimes, whereas when the flight orientation is locked so you're "flying by wire" it seems to do a better job of allowing a smooth yaw. But a ton of my flying on my big drones and my little hubsans are about practicing those kinds of moves. :)
 
  • Like
Reactions: KevMo Photog
that all having been said - got a good recommendation on the best 360° automated pano app? not digging Hangar 360. the resulting file is low-res and there’s no way to choose a higher resolution. and the app messes with the drone.

for instance - i used it recently to shoot the area surrounding a famous hotel in the mountains. it did it’s job, landed, etc. i turned off the craft and closed the app when it was done. i then opened the GO4 app and turned back on the P4P. i went and flew and took a whole bunch of beautiful still shots, landed and left.

it’s a 2 hour drive there and a 2 hour drive back to the hotel. i download all my shots of the day only to discover that all the shots i took AFTER the Hangar 360 pano were NEVER RECORDED to the SD card. i was so incredibly angry. the only thing i can think of is wondering if i power-cycled the transmitter. i don’t remember doing it or not doing it, and i don’t know if ultimately that was the problem...

so - tons of wasted time and i lost all my good shots. i’m done with that app and looking for something that does the same thing but *better*.

I had the a similar problem with the Hangar 360 app, though it just didn't capture its own pics, had no impact on other apps saving to the sd card. I was using it on an older iPad so it may have been that was the problem.

For auto pano I use AutoPilot primarily. I have built a few presets for different panorama styles that better fit my needs, typically with greater overlaps than the defaults, for example.


Honestly, probably 1/3 of the time I end up shooting the panos manually anyways. It gets a little tedious for full 360 shots to do by hand so those are almost always AutoPilot, but I'm often doing an HDR pano of 10-15 shots per frame and none of the apps can do that yet automatically. You can run the same saved job twice with a change in exposure but if it is sunsetish time it's better to do the two sets next to each other vs doing a full automated one twice. I also found if I do it manually I can move and frame the next shot sooner than the apps do sometimes. For shooting manually, I usually just pick a POI in the first 1/3, yaw until it's in roughly the same spot in the middle 1/3, then yaw again until its in roughly the same spot in the last 1/3. Same thing when going vertically. Its a lot of shots but I have had much better success with stitching them overshooting like that. I've had a few real disappointments early shooting some mega HDR panos but not doing enough overlap and basically they were throwaways except for pulling out some individual shots.

EDIT: Just realized you said automated and by that you probably meant automatic processing, too. I don't have an answer for that if so. I'm too much of a perfectionist and generally pushing the envelope beyond what any of the automated tools can handle anyways (see above :D) so I do the processing myself.
 
FWIW, since I posted that, I wrote two other posts, then imported all my pics (244) from tonight along with the 8GB of video. Did a quick organize in lightroom, quick global edit to all of the pics, then created this 80 shot HDR pano. Now that I've got the workflow for both shooting and processing pretty well down it isn't too bad. The fast moving clouds are the biggest time sink in terms of having to do fine tuning photoshop work. Anyways, total time is probably 20 mins for a full process of a bigger one like this, though admittedly part of that is having the better software tools on the workstation to do the job. :)

2017071616-_JP_.jpg


PS Final dimensions 13,718x6,859px. Workflow is Lightroom -> PTGui -> Photomatix -> Lightroom -> Color Efex3 -> Photoshop (if needed, I didn't go there in this case)
 
  • Like
Reactions: trevornewkirk
EDIT: Just realized you said automated and by that you probably meant automatic processing, too. I don't have an answer for that if so. I'm too much of a perfectionist and generally pushing the envelope beyond what any of the automated tools can handle anyways (see above :D) so I do the processing myself.

i spent quite a few years doing high definition virtual tours for several clients back in the day (2002-2010). i’m quite familiar with PTGui and KRPano and the several other programs that preceded them, as well as merging several of each photo into a decent HDR image prior to stitching and then tediously correcting control points. let me tell you – back in the day with a 26cc gasser and an Airfoil Pro-1 gimbal - it was a HUGE pita.

cut to now with advancements in tech and we have fairly quick and decent automated options like Hangar and rock-solid aerial platforms. main problem is with Hangar you can’t get a pano that you can zoom into in any way as the quality sucks. now - i’m talking spherical panos not equirectangular panos.

Hangar is just an automated program that uses KRPano as the stitching and rendering engine. it also uses the KRPano mobile plugin so that you can view them using the gyro in your mobile device/vr headset. it’s actually fairly easy to have it fly and take the appropriate shots and then stitching it together yourself in KRPano with your own logo for the zenith (or patching in your own sky). but i was looking for something that took less time.

Hangar is buggy at best. the fact that it glitched out my P4P so that none of the subsequent photos were recorded is totally evident of it’s shortcomings (not to mention no way to choose a higher quality end result).

i was looking for another ‘automated’ app that was more reliable and had better quality :/
 
Thanks. :)

Not sure if you played with ptgui recently at all, just one note is that the hdr component of it is much much nicer now. PTGui recognizes bracketed images and lines them up layered. So you can export out a layered OpenEXR file which Photomatix can read in for tone mapping. So much more convenient and efficient - in one step it can take from the base photos to an HDR pano ready for tone mapping. 9/10 times the autogenerated control points are good enough for a quick job.

After some huge time blocks with manual control points on images I didn't shoot well early on I can't even fathom doing that all the time with the platform above ^^ Tediously sounds like far too weak a word to describe what that process much have been. :)

I'll be curious to hear if you find another tool.
 
Okay so I was just poking about a bit myself. Curious if you've used the newest AutoPano Giga. I think I will grab the trial. The couple of things that jumped out at me that slow me down now and APGiga claims to address are -
- automatic recognition of multiple panos in a folder for batch processing with an interface that in pics looks like it may be useable.
- support for Adobe Lightroom lens profiles. If this includes the embedded DNG lens and color profiles This is huge. Without this currently I have to import into LT first and then export jpgs. This is probably almost 50% of the total time to process. But ptgui doesn't read the profiles at all so I end up with massively fisheyed and vignetted output.

EDIT: tinkered with the trial. the way the do the watermark on the exr in the file utterly wrecks photomatix's efforts to tone map unfortunately. But in the blending did a really great job with the clouds moving across the sky. That seems to be PTGui's achilles heel which has been a real killer unfortunately. The lens profile was just that, only lens profile, it did not read the embedded DNG profile so it still needs the intermediate step of outputting from DNG or just shooting in JPG.
 
Last edited:
Agreed, it is still a fun challenge. I've been doing a ton of practicing. Have you tried tinkering with fixed control orientations? For certain moves I find switching to an absolute bearing orientation works great. This is easier to activate in quickly in AutoPilot (maybe in Litchi?) than in Go4 where it is a dedicated flight mode. But for doing a slider type move with say a touch of yaw as you go past the POI, not having to add in a slow counteracting movement on the right stick is very helpful. I also have found that that right-stick counteracting doesn't seem to be completely reliable in that it can change the yaw speed sometimes, whereas when the flight orientation is locked so you're "flying by wire" it seems to do a better job of allowing a smooth yaw. But a ton of my flying on my big drones and my little hubsans are about practicing those kinds of moves. :)
Very cool! I have tried the fixed line type of flying yet! But it looks way cool and is very effective that I've seen! Which mode in Go 4 are you using for this? I have not hardly messed with Litchi since my 2 P4's last year. Been kinda iffy with Litchi and the P4P! LOL
 
  • Like
Reactions: DaRana
Those various modes are specifically to suck people in, like happened to you. Most serious pilots don't use most of that stuff. If you're interested in plotting a course from the top down, you MUST get LItchi. You will love it. The mission hub lets you pre-determine your mission course from your home computer, save it, upload to the craft in the field, and fly it. It takes a while go gain your confidence in the product, but if you start small, and safe, you will grow into larger missions that can amaze you. The mission hub maps even provide you with MSL and relative elevation to first waypoint data, which is super helpful.

Looks like I'm SOL, I have the P4P+. I waffled on the plus controller, but went with it because I found a great deal on it. But as far as I can tell, no Litchi for me. Can I get a regular P4P controller and link it to my drone? Or maybe this is my excuse to buy another drone :rolleyes:
 
  • Like
Reactions: DaRana
Very cool! I have tried the fixed line type of flying yet! But it looks way cool and is very effective that I've seen! Which mode in Go 4 are you using for this? I have not hardly messed with Litchi since my 2 P4's last year. Been kinda iffy with Litchi and the P4P! LOL

In Go 4 it would be Course Lock mode, or Home Lock mode in some cases. I have only used it in Go 4 a handful of times - since it is its own dedicated flight mode it can't be stacked with any other functionality like say Tripod mode for reduced inputs or gimbal pitch automation via a tracking function.

In AutoPilot it is simply a setting within other flight modes. Right now my most common usage is in Focus or Cruise mode, combining Focus mode on a subject (POI or AirSpace object, i.e. a phone/tablet) with Yaw mode set to focus. So wherever the drone flies it will yaw to keep the subject in the frame. So if then the pitch mode is set to an absolute heading. So, for example if I push up on the right stick it will fly along that absolute heading, while the AC itself yaws to keep the camera on the subject and the actual pitch controls are automatically shifted around the axis to keep the Aircraft actually flying in a straight line with the one input of just pushing forward on the stick.
 
  • Like
Reactions: KevMo Photog
In Go 4 it would be Course Lock mode, or Home Lock mode in some cases. I have only used it in Go 4 a handful of times - since it is its own dedicated flight mode it can't be stacked with any other functionality like say Tripod mode for reduced inputs or gimbal pitch automation via a tracking function.

In AutoPilot it is simply a setting within other flight modes. Right now my most common usage is in Focus or Cruise mode, combining Focus mode on a subject (POI or AirSpace object, i.e. a phone/tablet) with Yaw mode set to focus. So wherever the drone flies it will yaw to keep the subject in the frame. So if then the pitch mode is set to an absolute heading. So, for example if I push up on the right stick it will fly along that absolute heading, while the AC itself yaws to keep the camera on the subject and the actual pitch controls are automatically shifted around the axis to keep the Aircraft actually flying in a straight line with the one input of just pushing forward on the stick.
Dang man! That sounds awesome! I have got to start playing with these flight modes for sure! I have just gotten so used to flying manually as a challenge to myself I guess. LOL. Thanks for the info man!
 
Looks like I'm SOL, I have the P4P+. I waffled on the plus controller, but went with it because I found a great deal on it. But as far as I can tell, no Litchi for me. Can I get a regular P4P controller and link it to my drone? Or maybe this is my excuse to buy another drone :rolleyes:
You can def link a reg P4P controller with your bird man. 299 I think. Yeah I'm glad I had flown a bigger screen before I ever ordered my P4P. Plus no other programs kinda sucks too.
 
I have had my P4P now for over a month.
Here is what I have learned both from my experience with the 4 Pro, the different apps and reading other posts from those who have had problems/flyaways or crashes.
First, before you use automation, you need to have the skill set to be able to fly your drone anywhere in any condition and more importantly, be able to take over control at a moments notice and through much practice before, be able to steer clear of the eminent danger or event that is happening.
Secondly, each app has its own strengths and weaknesses, but all of them require practice and thorough understanding. Learning not to panic when something happens and being able to quickly shut off an app and start another
By reading the post from others who have had flyaways or unexpected results on their way. Missions, I have paid attention while practicing with the apps in my living room, and have learned to double check everything before I ever take off. For instance, one day I want to use zip line mode in auto pilot. As I went to go set my A and B positions, I noticed that the defaults we're set 500 miles away from me for the A position and the B position was set across country in New York. Had I not paid attention and executed the mode, who knows where my drone would've flown off to.
As a final comment, it has become my practice to always calibrate my compass before flying in any given location. I have never had any adverse flights, crashes, or unexpected results. I have been flying drones for over four years. To me it is just important to read everything you can, read all the posts you can, and understand the machine and the applications you use to control the machine.
I love my fountain and it's technology and capability.
 
  • Like
Reactions: STGill

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,358
Members
104,936
Latest member
hirehackers