DJI drones - New Mavic 2 pro announced tomorrow

jtr1962

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I took a quick skim of their regulations today no one would buy one of these drones if they intended to follow the regulations. You can't fly it indoors. You can't fly it out of line of sight (unaided). You can't fly it over 400ft. You can't fly it at night. You can't fly it over people outside who aren't part of your flying activity. You can't fly it if there is less than 3 mi visibility. etc...

What a joke...
So basically it sounds like all I could legally do with a drone is fly it directly over my property during the daytime, and no higher than 400'. So much for having it follow me on a bike ride and other cool stuff like that. I also would want to be able to go way higher than 400', which should be legal if you're not near any glide paths.

As an aside, do the smaller drones really present all that much of a danger to aircraft? I really think this problem is exaggerated. Aircraft hit birds all the time. They're designed to be able to strike objects of perhaps 10 pounds or less and keep on going without problems.
 

Stereodude

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So basically it sounds like all I could legally do with a drone is fly it directly over my property during the daytime, and no higher than 400'. So much for having it follow me on a bike ride and other cool stuff like that. I also would want to be able to go way higher than 400', which should be legal if you're not near any glide paths.
You can do a little bit more than that, but not much. You can fly it over public land presuming there's no other people there and it's not against the law for that public land and you're following all the other rules. It seems like most people just do what they want.

As an aside, do the smaller drones really present all that much of a danger to aircraft? I really think this problem is exaggerated. Aircraft hit birds all the time. They're designed to be able to strike objects of perhaps 10 pounds or less and keep on going without problems.
I'm not exactly sure, but I would tend to agree with your assessment. Maybe a LiPo battery getting ingested in a jet engine makes bad things happen.
 

Handruin

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Give this video a watch and you may get some additional insight into why the laws are a bit restrictive. I'm not saying this video has all the answers and it offers this person's opinion but he is trying to show where there is a missing representation for hobbyists.

 

jtr1962

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Why am I not surprised that commercial drone operators are pushing this? Their attitude seems to be get all those pesky hobbyist drones out of the way of our commercial drones. Or put another way, making money seems to entitle someone with more rights than someone who is just into it for the hobby. I don't see why both can't coexist. My thoughts are commercial drones need to have enough AI to avoid power lines, trees, people, and so forth. So avoiding hobbyist drones is already a built-in feature. It's even not a horrible idea for a commercial drone to be able to freeze a hobbyist drone's position in 3D space for a few seconds while it passes so as to avoid the necessity of tracking a moving object. But as usual, we're leaning in the direction of creating yet another regulatory nightmare.
 

Stereodude

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But as usual, we're leaning in the direction of creating yet another regulatory nightmare.
That's a feature not a bug to the people that run those regulatory agencies. If they can't figure out how to make money from it, they'll want to ban it. You don't want to put yourself out of a job. Doing things to increase your budget and size of your agency are seen as positives.

Then again, after you watch this...
 

jtr1962

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I'm amazed the operator can get a good enough signal to control the drone even from inside a box car. I always thought lots of metal blocks radio signals. He probably broke every law on the books but honestly the only thing that could have been hurt was the drone. A drone is harmless to a train. Look how trains plow through 18-wheelers at railroad crossings while the engineer doesn't even spill his coffee.

Only thing which was really not cool was bothering the conductor. Had he not done that, I doubt anyone on the train would even have known he was there.
 

LunarMist

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You can do a little bit more than that, but not much. You can fly it over public land presuming there's no other people there and it's not against the law for that public land and you're following all the other rules. It seems like most people just do what they want.


I'm not exactly sure, but I would tend to agree with your assessment. Maybe a LiPo battery getting ingested in a jet engine makes bad things happen.

A system should be developed to shoot down the drones if they stray from designated areas. I surely don't want to be flying when some drone gets sucked into the engine. :(
 

jtr1962

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A system should be developed to shoot down the drones if they stray from designated areas. I surely don't want to be flying when some drone gets sucked into the engine. :(
A bird is actually worse. It's denser overall, plus 100% of it is flammable. A large drone might destroy the turbines but a smaller one would probably just get ground up and spit out. Which brings me to the point that drones should be regulated proportional to their size/weight. Something weighing a few pounds is no more harmful than a bird. Something weighing tens or hundreds of pounds, like most of the commercial drones, should be regulated. Those can pose all sorts of dangers, especially in populated areas.

I still think there's a technological solution to this along the lines of an aircraft sends a signal which gets drones out of its flight path. That would keep idiots who enjoy buzzing helicopters from doing so.
 

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I have no plans to perform any FPV flying like in the video SD linked. That's a much different style with a particular crew of people who fly that style. Those folk are very talented with flying and I looked into building an FPV drone but decided to pass on that for now. I've followed many of the videos from Mr. Steele who has a large following.

I went to a park after work tonight and flew for about 15 minutes to capture the sunset. This was my second time flying and I flew it up to an altitude of 210' which was neat. This time was over water which was very anxiety-producing. The Mavic 2 Pro (M2P) was calm and cool the whole time. I'm really impressed how steady it flies. There were people around in the area but not near where I was flying. No one objected that I was flying which was nice. This M2P is fairly quiet compared to others and at 150' you really can't hear it flying.

I didn't stray too far out from the shore but I got some fun visuals. I'm still cumbersome with the controls so my pan/tilt is a little abrupt. I'm uploading it to YouTube and I'll post it when I'm done for anyone who is curious.
 

LunarMist

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A bird is actually worse. It's denser overall, plus 100% of it is flammable. A large drone might destroy the turbines but a smaller one would probably just get ground up and spit out. Which brings me to the point that drones should be regulated proportional to their size/weight. Something weighing a few pounds is no more harmful than a bird. Something weighing tens or hundreds of pounds, like most of the commercial drones, should be regulated. Those can pose all sorts of dangers, especially in populated areas.

I still think there's a technological solution to this along the lines of an aircraft sends a signal which gets drones out of its flight path. That would keep idiots who enjoy buzzing helicopters from doing so.

The two are not exclusive. That is like saying don't worry about a heart attack because you will probably die from cancer or an automobile accident.
 

Handruin

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A system should be developed to shoot down the drones if they stray from designated areas. I surely don't want to be flying when some drone gets sucked into the engine. :(

Do you dislike drones flying around entirely given you would prefer to shoot them down? What if the shot misses...it could end up killing someone with a stray bullet?

I agree that airports should be restricted for safety but suggesting they should be shot if they're not in designated areas is a bit much.
 

LunarMist

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Do you dislike drones flying around entirely given you would prefer to shoot them down? What if the shot misses...it could end up killing someone with a stray bullet?

I agree that airports should be restricted for safety but suggesting they should be shot if they're not in designated areas is a bit much.

I would not suggest bullets of course. I meant near the airplanes. There should be some parks or somewhere for free usage that people could enjoy as a sport. It's like rocketry, where you can't just fire them off anywhere.
After experiencing one aircraft anomaly I may be overly sensitive to possible engine shutdown. I flew more segments in the last 12 months than I like. :(
 

Handruin

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Are any of you video format savvy enough to suggest pros/cons on the formats for video when capturing? The M2P offers me the option to use either the MP4 or MOV container when capturing. In addition to that I can select between H.264 or H.265 for the codec. Right now I'm using MP4 with H.265 with no real strong opinion as to why other than I'm familiar with those two.

In addition to that, I'm curious on opinions on something else. The camera claims to support 4K with a max bit rate of 100Mbps. If I were to use H.265 would the max bit rate allow for more detail given the increased compression or does it not work like that? DJI marketing claims using H.265 will offer improved clarity and detail but I'm skeptical.

Also, what do people use for editing 4K video these days? Is Adobe Premiere Pro still one of the better options?
 

Stereodude

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MP4 vs. MOV comes down to what your editing software can support. Theoretically H.265 should have better image quality at the same bitrate. If your editing and playback software can support it, it's probably the better choice.

I'm not buying into Adobe's subscription model, so Premiere Pro would be out for me. I played with Kdenlive and found it was pretty decent for a free video editing tool.
 

Handruin

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This is my footage from yesterday afternoon during sunset. There should be a 2160P quality option. It's uncut so it's a bit dry and I'm also still figuring out controls so there is some abrupt view changes. I can see a quality loss on YouTube even at their highest setting. The raw video has much sharper details in all the ripples in the water when compared to the compressed version on YouTube. The raw space consumption for that was about 11GB split over three video files using the MP4 container and H.265.

 
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Stereodude

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Did you upload the straight out of camera file(s) to YouTube?

How were you controlling the exposure? Was the camera on auto?
 

Handruin

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No, I first used avidemux to combine the three video files into a single container without loss of quality. Then I uploaded to YouTube as a single file. I couldn't find a way to have YouTube combine them but I did see some references while googling that it may be possible.

The camera was on auto for this flight. You can see in some of the video when I pan down from the sun that the exposure changes dramatically. I am not comfortable enough with flying yet to spend time managing the camera. When I get more comfortable with the controls and the flying I'll play with the manual settings. There are a bunch of them to go through in the settings.
 

jtr1962

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Hey, I was expecting to see some cool moves around a moving train. :bglaugh:

Seriously, it looks like a nice piece of hardware. If I was still getting a decent number of hours on my consulting gig I might buy one for myself.

On the codecs, I concur with SD about using H.265. I learned more than I wanted to about codecs when I played with some HDTV receivers recently. I was wondering how they could squeeze one HD channel and several SD channels into the bandwidth formerly occupied by one SD channel. And then I found out H.265 will be used as the core codec in ATSC 3.0 to enable over the air transmission of 2160P using the same 6 MHz bandwidth as the present ATSC system. It offers roughly half the bit rate with the same subjective quality. The bottom line is the hardware and software support for H.265 will be coming, if it hasn't already. So to me it makes sense to use it.
 

Handruin

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I've been enjoying it. I haven't used it in a week or so, but I've spent time flying it just for fun at my local park. I've had no issues with it so far except one of the props had a crack in it and I don't know why. The package came with extras so it wasn't a big deal and I got even more when I bought the fly-more kit.

I've watched a ton of YouTube videos over the past month from various people showing off features and issues. There are a few gripes with the M2P for different reasons but nothing that warrants hating the device. There have been some reports that the 1" camera sensor isn't being fully utilized and they suspect it's due to the possibility of overheating while using the full 1" sensor in the small form factor that it's housed in. The color temps are also a bit warmer than people expected when compared to the Phantom 4 pro. This drone is also missing the high-accuracy landing which was available in the previous version of the Mavic Pro so people are surprised it's missing.

Many of these gripes may be addressed with future firmware updates so it's just a matter of time. I've read that they are working to add back in the high accuracy landing. I can't say any of these issues have me disappointed. The limiting factor is really me and my time to get out and fly in interesting locations. I need more practice with all the manual camera settings and features to get better with this. The flying isn't an issue for me as I've had many years experience with other radio controlled devices and this feels natural to me. In addition to that the M2P is very easy to fly which makes it seamless. Usually the only thing holding me back is concern with crashing or doing something that might break the law in any major way. I've noticed in the areas I've flown more than once that I've noticed lower-flying helicopters that were definitely below the 400' altitude. I was not flying at the time, I'm just more aware of it now being in this hobby that I was surprised how possible it can be to have potential issues.
 

Handruin

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The video is neat but I'm on board with a bit of skepticism that SD is showing by asking more questions. My first thought when seeing the video is how likely would such a direct hit be? Did they simulate the tests with actually wind blowing? My guess is no, and I might expect the drone to get pushed by through the turbulent wind making a direct hit like this very unlikely.
 

LunarMist

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The video is neat but I'm on board with a bit of skepticism that SD is showing by asking more questions. My first thought when seeing the video is how likely would such a direct hit be? Did they simulate the tests with actually wind blowing? My guess is no, and I might expect the drone to get pushed by through the turbulent wind making a direct hit like this very unlikely.

A second or two is fine. It was off by 25 seconds until I was able to find the old time setting. I connected it to the internet, but immediately MS wanted to D/L a bunch of stuff. I'll update the notebook in December when I have time to test it afterwards.
 

Handruin

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A second or two is fine. It was off by 25 seconds until I was able to find the old time setting. I connected it to the internet, but immediately MS wanted to D/L a bunch of stuff. I'll update the notebook in December when I have time to test it afterwards.

I'm pretty sure you meant to respond to the other thread with Windows 10, not this one.
 

jtr1962

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The video is neat but I'm on board with a bit of skepticism that SD is showing by asking more questions. My first thought when seeing the video is how likely would such a direct hit be? Did they simulate the tests with actually wind blowing? My guess is no, and I might expect the drone to get pushed by through the turbulent wind making a direct hit like this very unlikely.
I share SD's skepticism. This demo is purely for dramatic reasons to get legislators to enact a stricter set of regulations than necessary. It's much like those idiotic demos of bike helmets teachers give using eggs. You're either using a situation highly unlikely to happen in the real world, and/or you're ignoring real-world physics (i.e. heads are closer to coconuts than eggs).
 

snowhiker

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The video is definitely a "worse-case" type of situation but if such a strike does occur it could be very, very bad. However unlikely it would be.
 

jtr1962

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It sounds like it was a protest of some sort. Unfortunately, thanks to idiots like this we'll end up with heavy-handed legislation which penalizes the good guys.
 
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