A new drone!

So this post is actually several months late, for reasons I'll explain shortly. You see, back in May I got a new drone: the DJI Avata. I got it right before taking a trip to visit my family in California, and was excited to start sharing footage from it. One small problem: the video editor I use (KDEnlive) crashed every time I imported a clip into it. Not clips from my Mini 3 Pro, or GoPro 9, mind you, only the Avata.

I considered trying a different editor – maybe learning how to use Blender for video editing – but I'm busy, and lazy, and didn't get around to it. Fortunately, when I upgraded my computer from Debian 11 to 12 last month, something in amongst all the upgrades seems to have fixed the problem, allowing me to continue using what I know to make videos with Avata footage. Huzzah! And now that I can, have not just one, but two new videos!

Before that, though, a quick digression on types of drones, of which there are essentially two nowadays. They don't exactly have defined names (and all categories are blurry to some extent), but I've seen the name “flying cameras” to describe drones like my first one, the Mini 3 Pro. These are drones which are meant (generally speaking) for eye-in-the-sky photos or smooth cinematic video clips, up in air away from obstacles, since they're generally pretty delicate and a collision with almost anything will knock them out of the sky due to their unprotected propellers.

The other type is first-person view drones (or FPV). FPV drones project their camera feed directly on a headset instead of a controller, giving a pilot a more immersive experience which makes it somewhat easier to judge a drone's position and distance from obstacles. FPV drones generally focus on video rather than photos, and often from much closer to objects than the other type of drone. They're generally pretty hearty and damage resistant, and some (like the Avata) have propeller guards, allowing them to fly in close proximity to people and even potentially bounce off obstacles without getting knocked out of the air. (Though there are also ones without propeller guards.)

Since the Avata is so tough (as plenty of reviews on YouTube will attest), I wasn't too worried about letting my family fly it. There were some crashes, as expected (the Avata is good at getting you to take risks while flying it), and I thought splicing some of the resulting footage together could make for an amusing video. In this video, all the footage is from when my two brothers were flying (but while the crashing is amusing, lest you think they're terrible pilots I also included some non-crash footage to balance it out).

And to reassure that my drone is, indeed, still fine after those crashes, I have a second video. The footage for this was taken just a few weeks ago after discovering I could use it in my editor. This video was taken at Waiale Falls on the Wailuku river, not too far from where I live. The river's pretty low right now, so I thought I'd try flying up and down over the falls.

I wasn't originally planning to make a video out of this footage (hence why it's two clips put together rather than one long one), as my original motivation for taking it was trying out Gyroflow. Gyroflow is a program which can take GPS data embedded in a video file to stabilize it after it was taken, and a lot of people swear by it for video stabilization. It requires turning off any electronic image stabilization (such as I had on in the first video), and running the footage through Gyroflow after taking it, but I was impressed enough with the results that I decided to turn a few clips into the video above, and I can see why people speak so highly of it.

Anyway, I hope to be able to make and share some new types of videos with my Avata in future! One drawback it does have is that it's seriously loud. That's just par for the course for FPV drones since they need a lot of power, but it's not helped by the fact that it generally gets better footage when flown closer to the ground rather than up in the sky like my Mini 3 Pro. I dislike flying it around people, but it's a big island, so I'm sure I can find some nice secluded places to go flying.

And finally, while I know I've picked up two drones in less than a year since I started flying, I don't have plans to amass a large fleet or anything. I've got a representative of each of the two main categories of drone now, and while it's possible I might upgrade to newer models in future, they're both quite capable enough already that I don't see a big need to do so for a while. A hui hou!