Av8Chuck

Hi Mike, welcome to the forum. I don’t fully understand the use of the term “streaming?” If your asking how you can stream video from a camera on a drone so that you can monitor what the camera is doing, that’s pretty straight forward. Or are you asking about streaming directly to the web? If your hoping to learn about UAVs from a developers perspective check out: https://ardupilot.org/index.php

Any time.

Failsafe isn’t necessarily there to save the drone, it’s more about the drone going out of control and not damaging or hurting others. if your drone looses control inputs, telemetry communications, or GPS it can be programmed to hover in place, land or return to launch. Most DJI drones can be setup this way. Other OpenSource based flight controllers can provide many more options.

There are several things that effect range. It’s illegal to fly beyond visual line of sight. Transmitters are line of sight so any occlusion will effect range, trees buildings, hills etc.. Flying in dense WiFi areas Flying close to high energy sources like transmission and cell towers. Depending on the type f drone you have there is a good chance that if you fly beyond control you’ll lose your drone. That mostly depends on how the failsafe is configured.

Hi Tim, welcome to the forum. This is a GPS issue not a drone issue. GPS is line of sight and DTLA is pretty dense and can cause GPS to be ineffective. The issue is what does the drone do when that happens? If your dumb thumbing it then not having GPS should not effect how the drone flies, you’ll still have alt-hold but it will drift laterally. If you need to repeat a flight path then you’ll need an Internal Navigation System. Keep in mind that depending on the quality of the INS it will drift. INS ranges in price from several hundred to $13K for an Applanix — https://www.applanix.com/products/dg-uavs.htm Really depends on how not having GPS effects your mission. We’ve shot DTLA quite a bit.

Welcome to the forum. I don’t know where that is but I’d like to be there..

There are a lot of variables you need to take into consideration for owning and flying a drone. Do you know the speed limit on the 101 or the 405? Obviously its 65 but no one drives 65 in the LA area. Depending on time of day they drive 80 or 30. So are all those drivers breaking the law? Technically yes but most go with the flow of traffic which is rarely 65. My point is that if your a person that drives 65 because that's the law you might have a difficult time finding places to fly in LA. If you use common sense as a guide and can "go with the flow" LA is a great place to fly drones. Why do you want to fly there? Its a nice park but doesn't look any more interesting than lots of other places to fly. I stay away from parks as much as possible, too many liberal idiots in parks that think its their job to tell you what you can and can't do. Its easier to just stay away from them. It also depends on what your hoping to accomplish with flying a drone. If you want to do aerial photography for YouTube videos etc, then a small MAVIC2Pro is a good choice. Small enough to launch from just about anywhere, doesn't attract much attention when its flying and if you are careful how you fly it not likely to seriously injure anyone if it crashes. Phantoms have a bad rap, they're a little bigger, white, louder and stand out more without giving you any improvement in image quality. If your hoping to do more professional aerial the next size up would be an Inspire2. DJI is sunsetting this product line so spares parts, batteries and accessories will be harder to find and more expensive. Plus they are not quiet and much more noticeable flying around. Anytime you fly anything there's some risk involved. The challenge is that when flying a UAV remotely you are extending that risk to other people without them accepting the risk. When your driving everyone else who's driving on the same road share the risk. I regularly fly over a state park, is it legal - no, but that doesn't make me unsafe. The only Park Ranger to ever say anything to me was flying a MAVIC shooting aerial of the park. Fortunately the other Rangers recognized the hypocrisy of his actions and after pointing out how much better my footage looked than his they just told me to pick up my toy and go home. Common sense and being respectful of the proximity of other people goes a long way to enjoying flying in LA. I've flown downtown at sunrise on a Sunday, there was no one there to complain.

Nope, I disagree. Its beautiful landscape to be sure, but your reveals, the use of natural sounds, clouds as wipes, timelapse, color balance and even your choice of music is excellent. You provide much more than an aerial perspective you really capture the essence of what that place is like. I do have some suggestions, add more ground footage. You come around the corner of the mountain to reveal a building, it would be great if you had a low angle shot of the building looking back on the building to reveal where the establishing shot was taken. There's also two smaller lakes off in the distance in several of the shots, it makes me really want to see those two lakes closeup. Finally you have a bad frame around 2:21 when you cut from the timelapse. This is a very nice video. Keep up the great work and thanks for sharing.

Well done. Looks like an amazing place.

There’s some pretty good aerial, if that was what you were hoping for then you accomplished that. However, the fact that you wrote such a detailed explanation about this place leads me to believe there’s a story that you wanted to tell and in that regard the video did not accomplish that. So it really depends on what you hoped to accomplish by posting the video. My recommendation is that you shoot for the narrative you added in your description and add that to the video. Television is a closeup medium, aerial is great for establishing shots, you can add creative reveals and orbits but a little of that goes a long way. If you had flown low and close to the mansion, or low across the lake to the door to “walk” the viewer into the mansion, shot a lot of stills and video on the ground. Closeups, even extreme closeups of the architectural detail, widows, doors, and grounds you could add your narrative as voice over. You’d need about 300 shots and should try to keep it under three minutes. Here’s an example of one of my videos. I wanted to show life prior to COVID-19 and present it in a frenetic way so the video would move along. It’s missing a narrative but it’s shot and edited in such a way that the viewer gets a sense of what’s going on. I’d like to add voiceover but that’s a lot of work and I’m lazy.

Welcome to the forum. I think lots of people do what your suggesting. The challenge is integrating the use of the drone and the resulting footage into your work. I like to use the footage in a way that the viewer might not even be aware that it’s aerial footage. It certainly provides a unique perspective but it makes the audience think how was that shot accomplished? Far too many people are more concerned with showing off their flying skills than they are about creating great photography or cinematography. So when you view a lot of aerial YouTube videos they pretty much all start to look the same. It all becomes pretty mediocre. So I think aerial works better if the “aerial” aspect of the shot becomes transparent and the perspective speaks for itself. There’s more aerial in this video than you might think. I like revealing points of interest, shoot from the shore of a lake but then reverse the shot and shoot from the lake to the shore. It just looks like a shot from a tripod on the water, no real hint that its aerial other than it might make the viewer wonder how you got the shot. We just purchased a travel trailer that I hope to use as a mobile studio to work from. Good luck and don’t hesitate to share your work and ask for help.

What are you trying to invert from? There’s no free lunch. The flying time you get is directly proportional to the energy you put in. The only thing you can do is changes the energy source, use larger batteries, use higher voltages (ohms law), lift smaller payloads.

We'll have to do it remotely, I’m in California. Forming a committee is easy, it’s the voting block that you need to represent. For a PAC or Trade Association to be effective they’d need about 1M members.

@Adam Munson welcome to the forum. Great first post. I’ve suggested these sorts of political action committees and a trade organization but it mostly falls on deaf ears. I guess people are busy and maybe they feel powerless to take on prerogatives of the FAA. As tax payers all we need are numbers. With 635K members AOPA was able to influence all manner of legislation. Unfortunately I doubt we can muster more than 10.. people just aren’t interested in helping themselves. They don’t think it’s necessary until it’s too late.

Hi Richard and welcome to the forum. There's was the FAA require for you to fly commercially and then there are the requirements of a successful drone program (even if its only one drone). Chase has provided good information for getting the legal side started but you should also consider what your requirements might be to make a happy boss. What problem are you trying to solve using a drone? Its more of a program issue than a drone issue.