So I take this to mean Litchi doesn’t have a mode or setting enabling smoothly tracking a POI?
I already own Litchi, I like it, I’m aware it offers a lot of other features the DJI Fly app does not. I also have the DJI Fly app available on both my drones now that it supports Android 13. I have no plans to use Adobe tools (I’m deathly sick of them after close to 30 years of occasional use, meaning I forget details in between and get to relearn everything each @#$*% time I open one up, so I’m done!)
I only asked 'cos I thought I was overlooking something, or using the Litchi app improperly. If it doesn’t offer this capability, I’ll just use DJI Fly when I need that and Litchi will do other things for me.
Because I’m doing this for fun. And not all “professionals” need to use RAW - I made mostly instructional videos. I became familiar with dozens of editing systems over the years.
I worked with people in the TV industry early on, and they’re all psychos for image quality (which made even less sense in those days with analog SD video!) well beyond what the human eye could distinguish. I had no appetite to obsess over the decimal places of a particular spec, I just want to get the point across, so I moved towards jobs where the content mattered more than the crispness.
OK, I’ve done that - [Turns out you can’t post You-Tube links but this is the video ID:] Q_snt9AHU7U - flown today.
Here’s the mission: Mission Hub - Litchi - all curves, one POI. Hopefully you can see what settings I’ve got wrong?
Jerkiest camera moves yet. Even at normal speed it’s evident. Given how well Litchi handles the movements of the drone itself, I’m stumped as to the reason why.
You probably have a drone that can fly 50km/h on missions. But if your drone is a dji fly, then this is too big a mission, and you should definitely set the speed to 15 km/h for all points for a smooth flight. And split the mission over shorter distances.
And you probably made a mistake, you have mini2, you can’t have mini3 and litchi
I’ve had a look at your mission and youtube video. Your video is jerky for three reasons:
You’ve sped up the footage by a factor of 10. That is a sure way to exaggerate any issues. Don’t do that if you want your video to look smooth.
You are flying too fast for the height of the drone. My rule of thumb is to fly no more than 10 mph per 100 feet of height. You will need to convert that to metric. I often fly much slower than that.
You have actions defined at the first and last waypoints. These actions will be ignored when flying missions with curved paths. It would be nice but you cannot automatically start and stop video recording on the first and last waypoint of waypoint missions with curved turns.
Your finish action is set to “None”. I would never recommend having it set that way. Always have it set to RTH and then cancel the RTH if you desire. Having it set to “None” is too dangerous if something were to go wrong.
Waypoints 7 and 8 are too close to and on either side of your POI. This will never result in a good looking flight.
First off, to clear this up, I have a Mini SE and a MIni 3, the latter with the RC controller, so I couldn’t even try to use Litchi on it. I’m using Litchi on the SE only.
Let’s forget my last video, it was an experiment anyway. I wanted to see if I could ‘swoop down’ between the islands and twist around at the nadir, and that part actually worked reasonably close to my expectations!
But even during the slower parts of the mission, and even before the video is sped up, the abrupt adjustments in camera angle are evident. See my post from 13th August (5th one in this thread) where I posted my “Circling a small foggy island” video - it’s at only 4x playback, no speed changes, and has some big jumps (see around 12-13 seconds especially)
I put the speed up by 10x going around the whole lake because the DJI app’s Hyperlapse mode doesn’t even go lower than (effective) 60x - one photo every 2 seconds. I’d be just as happy doing a series of snapshots with Litchi, rather than speeding up a video, but I only found the place to set that just this afternoon!
Most of that mission is around 60 meters (under 200 feet) and I set the cruising speed at about 20kph which is like 12mph.
This surprises me as the starting/stopping recording actually worked fine!
Anyhow, I’ll keep the other tips in mind and go try a series-of-snapshots mission instead. But I really prefer to have hyperlapses done for me, otherwise I gotta go assemble the shots myself (yes I know Photoshop does it, I even remember how due to a very recent project, but it’s still kinda annoying…)
BTW thanks for all the help so far folks - I think I have the answer to my original question, re: the “Virtual Sticks” issue. I’m gonna go try the series-of-snapshots method (if it ever stops raining here long enough… I tell you, the drought the rest of the world seems to be experiencing is because we’re getting all the precip!) and then see how Photoshop deals with the results.
