Litchi or DJI-Go for video of large areas???

[Lindsaybev]

I am going to take video of a large 17 acre parcel, and forsee that I will need to have the drone outside my line of sight to accomplish the entire mission. Does Litchi allow for better autonomous flight than the Go app? I will need to take panoramic pics as well.

How do I go about taking video / panos of such a large area? ANY help would be very much appreciated.

Thank you!

 

[Waylander]

Hi Lindsaybev

To me I would go for Litchi every time for the mission you describe, here is a quick Youtube tutorial to show you how to go about it.

Good Luck
Waylander

 

[wa5tef]

Litchi for sure! Setup a Waypoints mission and fly it. Then watch video, edit waypoints and points of interest to improve it and fly it again. Keep tweeting until you get desired results. Seventeen acres is not such a large area to keep drone in sight unless it is maybe 100 yards wide and many yards deep. Let us know how it goes!

Thanks
Jim
WA5TEF

 

[Meta4]

How do I go about taking video / panos of such a large area? ANY help would be very much appreciated.

Try setting up a Litchi waypoing mission to fly around the outside of the property and manually turn the drone and camera to look half inwards as the drone flies around.

 

[ryantrax]

In Litchi actions at waypoints will only be performed on straight line paths, just keep that in mind. You may want to lay your mission out in the Litchi Mission Hub then export it to VLM (Virtual Litchi Mission) an app that processes the path and converts it to Google Earth. I did a video of the actual path flown compared to the Google Earth view, it's pretty handy for visualizing before you actually go fly it:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=879683565567243

 

[Lindsaybev]

Hi Lindsaybev

To me I would go for Litchi every time for the mission you describe, here is a quick Youtube tutorial to show you how to go about it.

Good Luck
Waylander

Thank you so much! I believe I have made up my mind!

 

[Lindsaybev]

Litchi for sure! Setup a Waypoints mission and fly it. Then watch video, edit waypoints and points of interest to improve it and fly it again. Keep tweeting until you get desired results. Seventeen acres is not such a large area to keep drone in sight unless it is maybe 100 yards wide and many yards deep. Let us know how it goes!

Thanks
Jim
WA5TEF

Got it! Thank you very much!!! And I will let you know how it turned out!

 

[Lindsaybev]

Try setting up a Litchi waypoing mission to fly around the outside of the property and manually turn the drone and camera to look half inwards as the drone flies around.

Thank you! I will do this! Your help is very much appreciated!

 

[Lindsaybev]

In Litchi actions at waypoints will only be performed on straight line paths, just keep that in mind. You may want to lay your mission out in the Litchi Mission Hub then export it to VLM (Virtual Litchi Mission) an app that processes the path and converts it to Google Earth. I did a video of the actual path flown compared to the Google Earth view, it's pretty handy for visualizing before you actually go fly it:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=879683565567243

Holy Cow! Very nice application! Thank you very much for sharing!

 

[Lindsaybev]

Does anyone know if there is a way to put the actual GPS coordinates on the video with the Litchi app? Or make a coordinates file to later copy on top of the video so that when we watch, the coordinates are available??

 

[umanbean]

Does anyone know if there is a way to put the actual GPS coordinates on the video with the Litchi app? Or make a coordinates file to later copy on top of the video so that when we watch, the coordinates are available??

There is a computer program called Dashlane which will overlay flight telemetry data over the video... has some cool looking gauges too. It's fairly involved though from what I understand... have to convert the flight data file to CSV or from CSV or something like that. I DL'd and tried it last year but didn't get very far.

 

[Lindsaybev]

There is a computer program called Dashlane which will overlay flight telemetry data over the video... has some cool looking gauges too. It's fairly involved though from what I understand... have to convert the flight data file to CSV or from CSV or something like that. I DL'd and tried it last year but didn't get very far.

Awesome! Thanks for the tip! I will look into it. I will let you know how "difficult" it is for someone with limited coding knowledge!

 

[umanbean]

Oops! I told you the wrong name of the program. It's Dashware not Dashlane! I did a search just for kicks and found that out in the first link I clicked.

Sorry...

 

[Lindsaybev]

Oops! I told you the wrong name of the program. It's Dashware not Dashlane! I did a search just for kicks and found that out in the first link I clicked.

Sorry...

Ha! No worries. I am just finally able to get to it today. Crunch time. I am flying my first mission for our business tomorrow, early. Been about practicing....wish me well!

 

[umanbean]

Been about practicing....wish me well!

Break a leg!

 

[Lindsaybev]

Just FYI: took the video today. Got both srt and mp4 files and will begin working on how to put those together this week.

I ended up having to use DJI Go app instead of Litchi (which I wanted for the preflight prep work). I tried to download the Litchi App on my phone (Samsung S5 - Android) and the Google app store said I "did not have the right kind of instrument", or something of that nature. I guess Litchi does not work on my particular phone. Bummer.

I know how to do the waypoints with DJI GO, but I only had one battery. So I felt it best to just make my way around flying myself to conserve the time I would have used building the waypoints. My first time up, using the maps view to navigate, I had my first opportunity to use RTH in an emergency. I flew it right into the face of an unusually large tree, and the collision avoidance stopped me dead in front, probably 130 ft. above ground. I was too afraid to move it around to try and extricate it myself, and hit RTH button. It turned and came right back and landed in front of me. Scary as heck, but so awesome that it worked as it was supposed to.

The rest of the flight was a piece of cake. I've got some really great video that is rendering right now, and tomorrow I will check the various places mentioned here (Dashware and Phantom Overlay) to learn how to take the srt files and burn them into the mp4 files so that I can see the GPS coordinates as it flies around.

Thank you everyone for your help!