Learning How To Operate: Aerial Videography with sUAS

This summer I flew a small Unmanned Aerial System (drone) for the first time. Through weeks of practice, I learned how to control a drone, and fly accurately and smoothly in order to capture the shots that I need. I learned how to plan an aerial photography or videography mission, how to execute the mission safely, and how to edit the resulting footage into an entertaining video. Through my practice of sUAS operation I was able to explore four parks in Longview, WA in a new way, from the air, and gain new skills to apply to my work and daily life.

My rough cut was rather rough, with some pretty glaring lapses in timing that were all anyone could talk about when I showed my video. I started over after this rough cut, because I renamed all the source video files and thereby accidentally broke their dependencies. I had not properly labeled any of my shots the first time, and for the longer final version of my video I decided that I needed to have labeled shots to make the workflow more efficient. I did not realize that doing this would break my video and that I would not be able to continue editing the copy I had in Premiere Pro, which I had imported from the Premiere Rush project once I realized that Rush was not able to do a music fade-out for the end of my video. I had to start over completely to go beyond the scope of my rough cut video and tell a story by touring four parks, and the town of Longview overall from the air.

I believe I did a better job meeting my marks this time in terms of syncing my video to the music, but I believe it would have been far easier to choose a piece of stock music that would match the pace of my video better, rather than trying to edit my videos to match the fast pace of the instrumental for Longview by Green Day, which was named after the town. If I had the opportunity to do this again, I would have first explored the kind of footage I was able to get from my chosen locations, explored the results, and then chosen music accordingly. My method this time caused me a lot of difficulty, and I believe that if I had an assignment to shoot a music video for the song Longview by Green Day I would budget far more money and time to achieve that goal than this project could possibly encompass.

When I set out to fly these videos, I was unaware of how exactly to optimize exposure. I had worked with digital photography before, and taken photo classes, but flying a camera and compensating for changing light conditions while making videos is new territory for me. If I did this video assignment again I would use Neutral Density filters more regularly, such as in the embedded video below demonstrating the filters. I have found that applying the ND4 filter or ND8 filter is good as a baseline for color grading. The videos flown at Gearhart Gardens Park and 7th Avenue Park, and John Null Park, as well as some of the Lake Sacajawea videos, all used an ND4 filter. However, applying the Fuji Clean HDR A preset filter in Adobe Premiere Pro to the footage helped me compensate for the differences between the exposures. More precise color grading is desirable, but given my limited knowledge of color grading and limited time due to data issues, I decided to keep that aspect simpler.

While I was recording at Lake Sacajawea, it started to drizzle. It had rained earlier that day, but I had looked at the forecast on UAVForecast and seen a 1% chance of precipitation predicted that hour, despite the clouds and low pressure system. I trusted that if it did start to rain I would be able to see it and ground my drone in time to prevent damage. I did not see it when it started, or feel it as I was apparently more sheltered by nearby trees than I had thought. The resulting video shows a lot harder rain than I thought was coming down. I brought down the Air 2S and dashed to my car where I dried it off with paper towels, and the rain promptly stopped completely, just as I had gotten my drone to safety. Although I worried about the battery and motors, the aircraft appeared to be OK.

At my next shoot location at John Null Park later that day, I also relied on the forecast telling me there was a very low chance of rain. Unfortunately, it started to drizzle again, and a lot more rain got on the drone and controller before I was able to dash to the car and dry it again, and again the rain seemed to stop as soon as I did so. I have flown since without issues and I believe that the aircraft was not harmed, but I will have to continue to monitor my battery telemetry with the Airdata UAV app after every flight to make sure the batteries are performing normally.

I am not very worried however as it was only a few drops and some people have even put "raincoats" on the Air 2S battery pack in order to do inadvisable things like fly during a thunderstorm as they do in this video to advertise said drone "raincoat".

I plan to take the lessons I learned this summer and continue to develop my skills with drone photography and videography, as well as editing. This summer I used a drone for the first time. I had previous experience editing but this summer I began to work with professional grade software and imaging equipment that can produce results beyond anything I have done before. Shots that used to be possible only with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment can now be achieved with consumer grade instruments, and the future looks bright. Discovering new elements of videography and editing to begin exploring has been fun and I am sure it will help me in the future.