{"id":16231,"date":"2020-05-01T20:13:06","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T18:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=16231"},"modified":"2020-05-02T18:22:36","modified_gmt":"2020-05-02T16:22:36","slug":"still-keeping-busy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/still-keeping-busy\/","title":{"rendered":"Still keeping busy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, here we are nearly six weeks into the Covid-19 lockdown in France, and although I&#8217;d obviously rather be doing other more important things, I&#8217;m still managing to find lots to do. Mainly I&#8217;ve been occupying myself with my little Eachine EG16 quadcopter while waiting for my new Fimi X8 SE 2020 to arrive and learning how to make videos using it. And it&#8217;s quite a lot more challenging than I originally thought.<\/p>\n<p>OK, anyone can just start the drone&#8217;s video camera running and then make a simple video afterwards as a sort of record of the flight using video editing software. But that&#8217;s not what I want to be able to do. I want to be able to make multi-frame videos the way that a lot of drone reviewers do on Youtube showing not only what the drone sees but also what you the operator see while you&#8217;re flying it.<\/p>\n<p>I already put up a simple video here on Micro-Trike on <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/arqkRx_OE9Y\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">April 1st<\/a> showing my first impressions of flying the EG16 just after I&#8217;d received it and now here&#8217;s another slightly more complex one that I shot shortly afterwards which features just one frame-in-frame and begins to show what I&#8217;m talking about.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"505\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T7FNc6U01Cc?wmode=transparent&amp;fs=1&amp;hl=en&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;iv_load_policy=3&amp;showsearch=0&amp;rel=1&amp;theme=dark\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>And the reason that things have been a bit quiet around here is that since then I&#8217;ve dived in even deeper and gone the whole hog, with up to two frames-in-frame using simultaneous videos from the drone itself (drone cam), from my smartphone of the app that&#8217;s used to control the drone (phone app) and from a head-mounted miniature sports cam (head cam). It&#8217;s been very tricky and a lot to learn as I&#8217;ll go onto explain, but first here&#8217;s the most recent and most successful of my efforts.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"505\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TcwLXyNYFqg?wmode=transparent&amp;fs=1&amp;hl=en&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;iv_load_policy=3&amp;showsearch=0&amp;rel=1&amp;theme=dark\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>But if you&#8217;re using proper video editing software, why is it so tricky you may ask? Well, take it from me, the first hurdle is just shooting the video that you need. Naturally, it all has to be shot simultaneously and in sync and that isn&#8217;t easy given that we&#8217;re not talking about high end, expensive pro-quality kit here. Although I have a GoPro at my disposal, I&#8217;ve been using one of my cheap Chinese sportscams as a head cam. The reason is that if I have an accident, I won&#8217;t mind too much if the little Chinese jobbie gets damaged but I&#8217;d be distraught if anything happened to my GoPro.<\/p>\n<p>For ease and convenience, I&#8217;ve mounted the sportscam on the peak of a baseball cap and the arrangement works well. The first problem was getting it lined up and I still haven&#8217;t quite got it right, but that won&#8217;t be difficult to do. What has been more difficult to overcome is the natural tendency while flying a drone to keep looking down at the controls then up at the drone and back again. If you keep doing that the picture in the viewfinder changes so rapidly that it becomes unusable and it takes quite an effort to get things under control.<\/p>\n<p>The next challenge is to get everything started and running all at the same time. Luckily, I&#8217;ve found that once running, the frame rates of the drone video camera and the sportscam remain perfectly in sync, which makes things much easier than I&#8217;d expected at the editing stage. However, that certainly isn&#8217;t true for my Android phone&#8217;s screen recording software which not only runs at a different speed every time despite being set up to run at a specific frame rate, but also runs at wildly variable speeds while recording is in progress.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure that the main reason for this is the phone itself. It&#8217;s probably lacking in both processing power and memory and although perfectly adequate for normal every-day use, I&#8217;m pretty sure that it lacks the horsepower for the kind of tasks that I&#8217;m throwing at it. I have noticed that many (most?) of the drone reviewers on Youtube who are doing similar things to what I am own iPhone 11 Pro Maxes which cost ten times what I paid for my phone so that tends to support what I&#8217;m suggesting.<\/p>\n<p>However, there&#8217;s no way that I can, or would, go out and splurge that much on a phone. I&#8217;m thinking that maybe a 5 GHx wifi tablet may be the answer &#8211; I&#8217;ll think about it a bit more when I&#8217;ve got my new Fimi and can see what will fit into its controller dock.<\/p>\n<p>When you shoot multiple simultaneous video footage it&#8217;s obvious that it all has to be in sync to be usable. It needn&#8217;t be frame perfect but it has to be acceptable to the eye of the viewer. As I mentioned previously, syncing the drone and my head cam footage is not a problem, it&#8217;s just the phone footage that is tricky to sync with the other two sources. I&#8217;ve spent many hours over the past week or so developing my own techniques that more or less overcome the problem. They involve manually syncing the phone video at multiple points within the footage itself and as they are quite complex and very labour intensive I&#8217;ll say no more on the subject.<\/p>\n<p>Once the syncing problem has been overcome, all that&#8217;s left is to compose and edit the video itself. This is not something that everybody can do or is good at but it&#8217;s something that interests me and that I enjoy doing. You need a video editing suite on your PC to do it though, and although there are many to choose from, some of which are free, I have used Corel Videostudio Ultimate for several years and will probably continue doing so despite it occasionally presenting me with problems as they all do in their own ways.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s it for now on my drone videos. Changing the subject somewhat, I had an amazing and unexpected experience a week or so ago involving an incredibly beautiful creature. Late one evening I heard a flapping sound at my kitchen door and when I looked to see what was causing it, through the glass I saw an enormous moth that was similar in size to a small bird.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/micro-trike.co.uk\/images\/grand_paon01.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/micro-trike.co.uk\/images\/grand_paon01_s.jpg\" alt=\"null\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/micro-trike.co.uk\/images\/grand_paon02.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/micro-trike.co.uk\/images\/grand_paon02_s.jpg\" alt=\"null\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It turns out that the moth was a &#8216;Grand Paon de nuit&#8217; in French, or in English a Great Peacock moth. It is the largest moth found in Europe and mine had all of a six inch wingspan as the photographs show after I&#8217;d switched on an outside light and it had settled on the wall next to it. It seems that they are around from late March through to June, so this was quite an early example. They are rather sad in a way. They have no proboscis and are unable to take on any form of nourishment in either solid or liquid form so only live for about a week before dying.<\/p>\n<p>The only upside for them is that during their short lifespan, their sole aim is to mate in order to ensure continuity of the species. To this end, the male sports sensors that can detect a receptive female up to a kilometre away. It&#8217;s a pity that I couldn&#8217;t communicate to my example that he shouldn&#8217;t be wasting his time flapping at my backdoor but should be doing his bit in the short time available to him to seek out a suitable lady friend in order to do the business.<\/p>\n<p>As well as the photographs, above, I shot a short video which although of poor quality, gives some idea of the size of the moth that we are talking about here.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"505\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KpocO_i22Go?wmode=transparent&amp;fs=1&amp;hl=en&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;iv_load_policy=3&amp;showsearch=0&amp;rel=1&amp;theme=dark\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve been on the receiving end of a few days of cloud and rain here in the Dordogne which should hopefully be coming to an end this weekend, after which increasingly better weather is forecast heading towards the summer. Let&#8217;s all hope that we&#8217;ll also all be heading towards the end of this dratted Covid-19 lockdown. Until then be kind to yourself, your family and friends and stay healthy.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, here we are nearly six weeks into the Covid-19 lockdown in France, and although I&#8217;d obviously rather be doing other more important things, I&#8217;m still managing to find lots to do. Mainly I&#8217;ve been occupying myself with my little Eachine EG16 quadcopter while waiting for my new Fimi X8 SE 2020 to arrive and &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/still-keeping-busy\/\">Read more<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16231"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16257,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16231\/revisions\/16257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}