My 1st attempt - I have a lot to learn

I've watched it twice and don't see an issue with the flights. Looks like a nice video to me. Well done and perfectly safe. Thanks for sharing!!!

There is not much safe about hovering over kids. You may not kill them that way, but is it really worth the risk of scarring their faces ?

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Other than that, some nice footage in there.
 
I would contend that hovering over a person for a short time is safer than swimming. Or safer than driving to the beach. Or playing contact sports.

But I guess you are right about it having a small risk.


Sent from my iPhone using PhantomPilots
 
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I would contend that hovering over a person for a short time is safer than swimming. Or safer than driving to the beach. Or playing contact sports.

You may also contend that holding a boiling bot of water over their heads for a short time is safer than playing contact sports; ( Inappropriate Comment Removed )
 
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Nothing is totally safe.

But many risks are entirely avoidable, flying over kids (or holding boiling pots over their heads) being one of them.

But clearly you're one of these stereo typical phantom pilots that sees no risk and doesnt give a **** about other people's safety. Maybe you are one of those that only be convinced with financial risk. How does a $50+K fine sound to you ? Is that an acceptable risk for making some cute shots of your kids?

Here is the thing. The AMA safety code states:

"All pilots shall avoid flying directly over unprotected people, vessels, vehicles or structures and shall avoid endangerment of life and property of others."
http://www.modelaircraft.org/files/105.pdf

Why should you care what the AMA says? Because from a regulatory point of view, their safety code is the only thing that separates your drone from any normal, full scale airplane. The moment you violate their code, you are no longer flying under the FAA model flight exemption, and therefore you are considered an airplane, you fall under FAA regulations, must have pilot license, etc. I cant begin to count how many FAA regulations are violated here, each of which carries a $11K fine. Have a look here:

Minnesota Man Faces $55K in Fines After Flying Drone
 
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1st attempt at using Davinci Desolve to edit and color grade.
Lot of shaky video. 90% flown manually due to poor planning. I have lot to work on!

Enjoy and happy 4th of July
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Actually, I really liked this video. You have a lot of great scenes here. Yeah, your could have done this, or done that, but the bottom line is that you have a natural sense for artistic creation and composition. You will get much better, but I'd feel pretty good about this video. Good job!
 
1st attempt at using Davinci Desolve to edit and color grade.
Lot of shaky video. 90% flown manually due to poor planning. I have lot to work on!

Enjoy and happy 4th of July
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VERY well done!
 
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I've watched it twice and don't see an issue with the flights. Looks like a nice video to me. Well done and perfectly safe. Thanks for sharing!!!
Its totally illegal to flyover people, houses and roads. If it falls out of the sky it could kill someone.
 
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1st attempt at using Davinci Desolve to edit and color grade.
Lot of shaky video. 90% flown manually due to poor planning. I have lot to work on!

Enjoy and happy 4th of July
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For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
That was a great video! Seriously, I liked the way you sped it up to get to the shots you wanted. Looks like you have some fantastic kids, too.
 
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Good first attempt. Thanks for sharing. You live in a really nice area! :)

Tip for your next videos: Cut down some stuff like unwanted moves from the bird, make sure the shots are moving on the same direction to avoid disorientation and keep some shots at the regular speed and/or low speed since high speed can sometimes give headache.

On my side I use Final Cut Pro X, never tried Davinci.
 
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Looks good to me! Almost looks like you came close to getting shot down by that soccer ball your kid headed at around 2:55...LOL. My only suggestion would be to export your videos at a higher bitrate as there was quite a bit of macroblocking in a few areas.
I have encoded this video everyone possible under the sun. I literly tried probably 50 different combinations.
In the end they all played beautifly on my computer and show pixelation on youtube.

I am chalking this up to how youtube re-encodes my video and the fact that in some scenes there is so much movement and changing light conditions.

When playing locally on my computer there is ZERO macroblocking/pixelation etc

Facebook looks much worse, I guess they compress it even more and the version I have on Vimeo here:
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Doesn't do any better

There are options if I want to pay money. Also if I had a popular channel or a corporation (like redbull, they have videos that get encoded without as much compression) then it might be possible. But as it is I have spent more time messing with this then any sane person should.

Here is an updated version (the macroblocking is still there, depending on the screen size you view it on)
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I just wanted to chime in here real quick.

First of all, thank you for all the kind comments, I REALLY do appreciate it.
I am working on flying smoother. I have always had ADHD and my flying shows it, lol. It is as if I need to do 2 flights each time; one just to play and look around and give in to my constant distractions and another with getting the footage I am after in mind. I can't tell you how many times I cussed myself when going through my footage asking myself what I was thinking and asking myself why did I do that.
It is a work in progress. There are many pilots here whose skills blow my mind.

Second regarding the comments of unsafe flying, I concede, they are fair comments.
I am far from a role model and do not always end up making the best decisions or exercise the best judgement. I should work on that, trust me I do not want to put a black eye on the hobby.

On another note, with all the horror stories I have heard, I was expecting to be confronted at least once by an angry person regarding my drone (I am sure it will happen sooner or later). I was pleasantly surprised by how curios and polite everyone was. Even today in 2016 it got a lot of attention and everyone seemed to be cool with it. I got a lot of waves and smiles, struck up tons on conversations.

Thanks for all the comments :)
 
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I am chalking this up to how youtube re-encodes my video and the fact that in some scenes there is so much movement and changing light conditions.

When playing locally on my computer there is ZERO macroblocking/pixelation etc


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If you are able to, or even wanting to, I would be willing to encode a scene for you where there is macroblocking to show that it has little or nothing to do with YouTube's encoding and everything to do with the way Davinci exports.
All you would have to do is figure out how to slice a 10 second chunk (or thereabouts!) from your RAW footage and put it in a Dropbox account for me to access. I'm sure there are plenty of free ways on a Windows platform to trim RAW footage.

Cheers
 
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If you are able to, or even wanting to, I would be willing to encode a scene for you where there is macroblocking to show that it has little or nothing to do with YouTube's encoding and everything to do with the way Davinci exports.
All you would have to do is figure out how to slice a 10 second chunk (or thereabouts!) from your RAW footage and put it in a Dropbox account for me to access. I'm sure there are plenty of free ways on a Windows platform to trim RAW footage.

Cheers
I ended up exporting raw video from Divinci and then using handbrake to encode at lossless quality.

I do not think it is possible for this video to be on youtube without getting some of the macroblocking at some of the scenes that have a lot of quick movement. Well other then changing or slowing things down, which I do not want to do.

A very high quality version can be downloaded here: cubby.com

This one does not have the macroblocking issue (it is 7GB thought)

I did send feedback to youtube and vimeo suggesting that they allow one-off high quality copy of a video for small one time fee of 5 or 10 bucks to encode that one video at a higher bitrate, that is something I think I would have done and others would be interested in doing as well.

If you think you can work some magic on the video and get it uploaded without the macroblocking I would be speechless.
Now I did notice the issue doesn't occur on smaller screens nearly as bad.

Thanks
 

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