Production Log 2-28-2019 Project Aerospace
2-28-2019
Went to Flushing County Park, this is a park I’ve never been to. I was a little worried this would be a place not large enough for my drone but when I got there I was relieved to see there were many places I could take off from. Today I was shooting for Live to Tape’s Flow and Project Aerospace’s Lighter than Some series.
First I found a nice place to fly the drone where no one would come around and I set up to fly. First I flew with the larger battery while filming video on the drone. The battery lasted 10 min’s which is what it’s supposed to. Then I flew with the smaller batteries which are supposed to last 5-6 mins. This are factory batteries from the drone manufacture and I’ve ordered additional ones. These factory batteries it seems only give 2 or 3 good flight times then don’t work after that. All the new and old factory batteries lasted around 50 seconds before the low battery alert came on and I would land as fast as possible. This worked out okay because I was take photos with the drone. While taking photos the camera takes two photo every second, this helps guaranty where ever the drone is aligned a photo is taken. I cycled through each of the factory batteries taking photos with each one. The longest lasting battery was two minutes. This meant that all the batteries were no longer good. So now I plan on recycling them and ordering the third party large batteries, they cost a little more but have been exponentially more reliable then the factory batteries.
Then I flew with the last large battery filming video with the drone. It went very well but I was getting nervous because I was getting some interference from the FPV gear (First Pilot view, viewing from a camera on the drone) I flew very close to myself so if it failed I could just take off my video goggles and fly by line of site. I only fly in line of site range but this time I wanted to not take any chances and be able to land in seconds.
All in all this was a perfect flying session. No crashes and everything was under control. I packed up and then prepared to shoot for Live to Tape’s Flow Series.
I build a PVC Shoulder mount that has a DIY PVC Glide cam attached to it. This means I get the comfort and ease of a shoulder mount; this means I can hold heavier weights longer. Then the Glide mount smooths out the shaking and swaying while walking. It stabilizes left, right, forward and back motion but does not stabilize twisting (yaw) motion. This means I really have to focus on walking in strait lines and not so much twisting.
I filmed for about 10 min’s walking from recreation area to recreation area then I noticed that the camera case had fogged up. While flying the drone I was landing in the snow and some of the snow got on the camera. Now that the camera was in its mounted case the humidity from the water and heat from the camera caused the case mount to fog up. I tried cleaning the camera case then began filming again redoing all the walk paths but this time I left the camera case open a crack so the outside air could defrost it.
This worked a little bit but there was a glow/ haze effect that actually made the images look more heavenly and very beautiful however I am going to go back and re-film the Flow footage at this park. I am going to use this glowing heavenly footage but I would still like a crisp clear footage for an additional episode.
I finished filming early I arrived at the park at 9am and was finished with the droning and steady cam at 10:40am. I had scheduled filming until 1pm so I decided to go film an additional flow episode at Kersley Park. I had filmed an episode of flow there before but the hard drive got corrupted and I lost all that footage. This ended up working out because I was able to get some beautiful snow in the park where the previous footage was of end of fall with naked trees, mud and no snow which looked very depressing. The camera still fogged up a little but nowhere as much as before.
I walked the whole park and back and still finished filming at 12:30pm still early, so I made my way home. In conclusion I’ll have to go back to flushing county park, to film more video footage at different areas in the park and film a new episode of flow for Live to Tape. But all in all it was a very good shoot.