I was excited to bring my drone on the Scout 800 recovery trip last weekend in order to shoot some B-roll of the operation. I’ve flown enough drones now to know how they operate and what to look out for, so I wasn’t feeling stress about that, but knowing I was asking all of my friends to help me with this project and to give me ten minutes to shoot video made me feel rushed. Right before we winched the truck onto the trailer I unpacked the drone and got some good location shots, flying it back and forth over the entire field of trucks until I had it hovering over the Scout. Then I brought it down lower for some more dramatic shots, and promptly flew it into a tree. When I picked it up the rear left leg flopped over in my hand: a combination of the fall and the bitter cold had snapped the plastic in two at the body.
Doing a little digging around the internet, I found some helpful videos that walked through disassembling the drone, removing the old parts, and replacing them with new units. This involved carefully prying the body apart and soldering three tiny 22ga. wires to connect the motor back up to the control unit. At this point, having disassembled and fixed cameras, laptops, stereos, iPods, iPhones, car radios, power tools, and appliances, I’m used to fiddling with small finicky bits to get things working again. Within a half an hour I had the new leg in place, wires soldered, and covered in heatshrink tubing. I took it for a test flight before buttoning the case back up, and used it this afternoon for some more cinematic shots of the truck.
Clearly I’ve got to be more careful about the drone’s proximity to ther objects. This one only has detection in the front, where the Pro model has all sides covered. Having looked through the footage I did get, I’m really impressed with the quality I got, and I’m still very happy with my purchase.
I went down to Gaithersburg last night to pick up a used drone from a nice man who spoke very little English. Thankfully the concepts of photography are pretty universal, so we were able to communicate well enough for me to feel comfortable with the purchase. It’s a DJI Mini 3, which is a small consumer level drone released in 2022. For the money, I got the drone, a controller, a battery, and a three-slot charger. The drone is in good shape and connected to my phone easily after he unpaired it from his account; I had it working with mine in less than five minutes. A quick test with an SD card confirmed the camera was working and recording, and a test flight in his living room proved it was working.
It’s good enough at this point for what I’ll be doing: stabilized 4K drone shots of projects and events, which is something I’ve been wanting to practice. I plugged my old iPhone SE2 into it and was pleased to find that DJI offers an older version of their Fly software that will run on it, which means I’ve got a dedicated video screen to work with.
Tomorrow I’ll take it out and do some test runs in the sunshine, and we’ll see how the whole package works.
This morning there’s about an inch of snow on the ground, which fell overnight. The house is quiet while the girls are still asleep, and Hazel is snoring in her bed at my feet. We hosted our friend Christopher yesterday, and were fortunate enough to take in the Amy Sherald exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at an art museum, and her show was inspiring and challenging—just what good art should be.
This evening I’m going to run down to Gaithersburg to hopefully pick up a DJI Mini 3 drone from a guy on Marketplace. The Mini 3 is a midrange consumer model that’s small and portable enough to sneak under the FAA size limit but large enough to carry a 4K camera, and I’d like to pick one up to work with next year for video projects. There is a possible ban on DJI coming up on December 23, which could mean that they will be unable to sell new drones in the US, so I figure it might be a good time to grab something before used prices spike upwards.
The IT folks at work were super cool and gave me a decomissioned PC laptop this summer so that I could run the PC-only Sniper software for the red truck. With the Sniper project on hold, it’s been sitting on my shelf, but I dusted it off this week to load a free copy of the presentation software we use for our yearly looking-forward event. It always takes us a full day to get things loaded on the display machine at the filming venue, and I figured I’d try to set it up ahead of time to speed up the process. I got the program running, went to plug it in to an external monitor via HDMI cable—and it sparked as it touched the side of the laptop. The screen went dead, and I could not get the laptop to power back on.
I’ve never seen or heard of this happening before. I talked to the IT folks and they said they’d never heard of it either, but they’re going to hook me up with another decommissioned unit next week. PCs are weird, man.
DJI has announced (and released) the Action 6, an update of their action camera with an adjustable mechanical aperture and a larger square sensor which they promise will make cropping to different aspect ratios. I have an Action 3 and a 4, and I’ve been very happy with both cameras (apart from their picky insistence on particular SD cards). I tend to buy them one generation behind the current version, and I have no real need for a third right now, but I’ll keep an eye on these.
Over the last month, I’ve shot and edited more professional video than the previous three years (COVID and all of that) and I’ve really enjoyed learning new tricks. The stuff I’m shooting for myself is pretty basic—setting up a couple of GoPros and recording the entire scene, while the stuff for work is more tightly scripted and produced. I’ve spent a lot of time developing narratives and building out stories from a rough outline, and then teasing out those stories during live interviews, which is challenging and fun.
I’ve also been using a new camera/sound rig: a Sony A7Sii with a wireless RODE mic setup, which has been a challenge to learn but has been yielding some excellent footage. I’ve also done a crash course in shooting S-Log to color-correct in post production, which is a lot like shooting photographs in RAW and making adjustments in the processing workflow. Finally, I’m pushing the boundaries of what I know about Final Cut Pro to take advantage of all of these new methods, and I feel like I’m a lot more proficient with the editing suite.
I think the next thing I really need to push are my setups and framing, to make things look and feel more interesting. Basic interviews are easy, but making them visually interesting is key.
Last week I rented a drone kit for work in the hopes that I could save some money by avoiding commercial B-roll. Pricing for video clips has gone up recently, and my total costs for a 4-minute video have gone past $1500/ea, which is a lot of money for an NGO. I typically scour my limited stock of company-owned footage before I go to the online services, but I have to be careful I’m not recycling too much, and I really don’t have a lot to begin with.
I picked out a DJI Avata 2 with a set of FPV goggles mainly for the price: about $300 for 7 days’ usage. As usual, LensRentals sent it in a sturdy box which contained a custom Pelican with all of the components. I watched a couple of videos online and then took it out for a spin.
This drone is about six generations beyond my old Phantom 2, so it’s probably 1/6 the size, in a compact little package, designed for acrobatics and not stability. The blades are completely enclosed and the camera is on a 1-axis gimbal, so any tracking needs to be done by moving the drone itself. This is achieved by using the goggles and a handheld controller, which is a huge leap beyond the joystick/cellphone system my old Phantom employed. It took some time to understand the control setup but once I committed that to muscle memory, it got much easier to use. I took the Scout over to an empty parking lot and used it as a target, burning through each battery in about 15 minutes. I very much enjoyed the goggles and I think I would make them mandatory for any kit I was going to buy—they make flying so much easier than squinting into an iPad in the sunlight. The video is crisp and stabilized, and the drone performance is impressive, but this is not the model I’d consider purchasing to shoot stabilized aerial footage.
The weather this last week has been mercifully cool and dry, and I’ve tried to take as much advantage of it as possible. Saturday morning I got the girls up and moving, supplied them with fresh pastry, and drove us over to Patapsco State Park for a 4-mile hike through the woods. This is the trail Rob and I used to bomb down on mountain bikes back in the day, and apart from a section at the bottom being closed and re-routed, I remember almost all of the obstacles along the way. Hazel was happy to chug along at the head of the pack and probably did about 3/4 of the work getting me up the hills.
I spent all of my time last week shooting interviews for a project at work, and used the experience to dial in a setup for the new camera system. I bought us a matching pair of Sony A7siii rigs after COVID and have been learning the ins and outs of their operation, which has taken some time, but I’ve got a system for shooting video and audio that’s much less complicated than the one I inherited ten years ago. I’ve been experimenting with S-Log settings for color grading and I’ve got a good workflow for that now, and using an audio limiter in Final Cut to balance out the sound. It’s almost like I’m a professional.
I also rented a DJI Avata 2 drone for the week with a set of FPV goggles, figuring I’d use it to shoot B-roll at some of the locations I was on, but it took time to set up and understand its operation. It’s a small unit with enclosed blades and a 4K stabilized camera, and takes about one minute to power up and initialize. From there, you get about 15 minutes of flight time per battery, depending on how hard you fly it. I spent a couple of hours flying it around a parking lot on Sunday, using the Scout as a subject, and I came away (mostly) impressed. The first trial run was thwarted by a controller that wouldn’t calibrate properly, which meant the joystick control only worked in 3 axes. And the SD card I was using wasn’t fast enough, so it only captured 2 minutes of footage before crapping out.
I used that time to familiarize myself with the system and went back out at dusk after charging the batteries again, and had more success with a better card. I think there are a few more settings I need to learn—there’s a way to fly it and use your head to independently move the camera that I need to figure out.
For Jen’s birthday, I got her a bird feeder with an integrated camera like the ones my Mom and sister have. I bought her a birdhouse with a camera mounted inside last Christmas, and we finally watched a family of sparrows hatch a clutch of eggs early this summer, but the camera isn’t as clear as I was hoping for. This one is much crisper. I mounted it on the post outside our back door and filled it with seed; the birds haven’t found it yet, but I’m hoping they’ll catch on soon.
For the first time in 11 years, I went on a company retreat with my department outside the office. In years past, we have gathered in the office conference room for six to eight-hour days to talk about strategy and planning, with brief side trips to local restaurants or activity areas. This was the first time we’ve actually gone to a different city as a group.
The planning team chose Charlottesville for its proximity and easy access by train. We made it to our hotel before noon, had some lunch, and gathered for a kickoff, then took a short drive to go to Monticello for our afternoon activity. Splitting up into two groups, I chose to tour the house and was pleasantly surprised to see that Jefferson’s complicated history has not yet been erased by the revisionist white supremacists. It’s still as beautiful and disturbing as it was the last time we were there, and that’s a good thing.
Retreats are always a tough balance between focused strategy sessions and teambuilding, and in years past our group seemed to lead heavily into days of focus and a lot less on teambuilding, which got exhausting quickly. This time the balance was much more in favor of talking to and interacting with people we don’t normally get to see. As our group has gotten more global we have more people on our team living and working remotely, so it was good to meet people from different countries and get to know them.
We spent 2 1/2 days in Charlottesville and I would say it was by far the best retreat focus on my group that I’ve been to since I’ve been at WRI.
While I was there I had two rolls of 35mm B/W developed from our trip to Portugal. Some of the highlights:
