Video from the C23 and H Plus

[Barton]

I hesitate to jump into this discussion for fear of being accused of being an H+ video fanboy .

For the past few weeks that I have owned my first UAV (H+), my flight time has been focused on improving my pilot skills (although the H+ seems incredibly easy to fly in Angle mode, even for a newbie). I've been learning how to turn using just yaw, then upping the game to yaw, pitch and roll. Now that I'm feeling sort of competent (or maybe overconfident), the time arrived today to spend some time using the H+ for its intended purpose - a flying camera platform.

So, I spent time flying and taking video at 4K, 60 fps, over the aerodrome park I have the good fortune to use as my flying location. Flew relatively low over a recently harvested portion of the aerodrome, explored some trees at the far end of the field, took it up to 400', used the panning feature of the gimbal to do a slow 180 degree pan of the small town close to the field. Basically shot about 12 GB of video (18 minutes). When I looked at the video on my 4K computer monitor I was extremely pleased, to say the least. The video was sharp, no pixelation that my untrained eye could detect (certainly not obviously apparent as in the 1080p compressed video), and to me, the auto pan at 400' was amazing. Rock steady video platform and very smooth panning.

So, mark me down as one happy camper and H+ owner. The results exceeded my expectations. Note of course that I am not a professional with the trained eye to look for and become frustrated by the most minor of imperfections. .

The the memory card used was Samsung 64GB 100MB/s (U3) MicroSDXC EVO Select Memory Card and seemed to have no issues keeping up. Cars passing by on a nearby road suffered no jerky motion or obvious hiccups.

The actual video footage is not artistic or worth anyone's time to view (plus I am not sure how to make it easily available without compressing it..).

I just wanted to provide an upbeat post on my impression of the video quality from the C23. Glad I waited for the H+, and very pleased with the results.

 

[NorWiscPilot]

Thanks for jumping in, Barton!

I am one who enjoys the good experiences much more than the seemingly constant ... you know...

Learning how to use the equipment is what it is all about, in my opinion. Sharing techniques and learning tips and tricks from others willing to share is what I get the most out of.

Keep up the learning!

Jeff

 

[PatR]

Barton,

In a way your experiences with the H Plus carries a lot of weight. No previous UAV experience yet you are finding the Plus not to be difficult to successfully operate. You make no mention of issues or performance complaints. You have no history to use for comparisons, it either works for you or it does not.

Better still, you are having no difficulties using the camera, and the camera is what it’s all about.

Ultimately, if you can obtain and effectively use a Plus, anyone can, and that alone defines a well designed consumer drone.

 

[Peggy]

Bit harsh on a pro pilot who was just getting a feel for his new H Plus. I'm sure there must be other pros who have crashed a new drone.

But anyway, I owe him, you and this forum an apology because I have just discovered that most of the artifacts I saw in these clips were introduced by my browser.

I knew that Safari on a Mac couldn't play any YouTube videos at higher res than 1080p but that didn't bother me as my connection can't support much more than 720p anyway. But what I hadn't appreciated was the mess that Safari makes of converting YouTube's VP9 codec to one that Apple approves of.

The dreadful still image I posted earlier is only visible in Safari. And my comments about that pilot's portfolio were therefore misplaced so I have deleted those posts. I will also review my previous comments about artifacts and ensure that I can still see them in my new default browser, Opera.

Thanks for making me investigate.

Chrome plays YouTube videos back at 4K. I never use safari for watching videos off any website.
Chrome is smooth and works a treat bud

 

[YuKay]

Chrome plays YouTube videos back at 4K. I never use safari for watching videos off any website.
Chrome is smooth and works a treat bud

Thanks Peggy but Chrome is banned from my computers for being ugly, bloated and invasive. Opera works well for YouTube and is inoffensive.

I'm sure that Chrome (Alphabet) is benefitting greatly from the YouTube/Apple stand-off and may be in no rush to resolve it. According to Wikipedia, one of its top executives has said: "a lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience". That doesn't sound healthy to me, not least for free market economics, but it looks like the EU is on their case.

 

[YuKay]

Thanks for clearing up the image quality issue you saw.
If you delete your original post that includes the video, I will delete my replies as well.

Jeff, I'm not sure which "original post" you are referring to. If you mean my timeline critique of the Terrestrial Imaging video on Tuesday, I have now viewed that video in Chrome, Opera and Safari and my observations have been verified. That video was not encoded in VP9 and so displays similarly across the board.

 

[YuKay]

Referring to the one about which my comments were perhaps less than complimentary. The hedge “trimmer meets avionics” example, that is.

As I said above, that was deleted at the same time as my post of the still frames.

 

[NorWiscPilot]

As I said above, that was deleted at the same time as my post of the still frames.

I have removed my posts related to the brush trimming.

 

[PatR]

Thanks Peggy but Chrome is banned from my computers for being ugly, bloated and invasive. Opera works well for YouTube and is inoffensive.

I'm sure that Chrome (Alphabet) is benefitting greatly from the YouTube/Apple stand-off and may be in no rush to resolve it. According to Wikipedia, one of its top executives has said: "a lot of the innovation that we want to do now ends up requiring controlling the end-to-end user experience". That doesn't sound healthy to me, not least for free market economics, but it looks like the EU is on their case.

Very good points and worth understanding. Chrome is Google, Google owns YouTube, and Google scans all G-mail accounts for data mining and other purposes. Facebook has been caught pants down with collecting and selling user data but many don’t know that Google is much worse in this regard, and always has been. Those using Google Search are are also tracked and data mined to assist in development of targeted advertising. From a personal security stand point Google is the most dangerous of them all.

 

[YuKay]

Just to highlight that, PatR, I use a Mac utility called Little Snitch which flags up every unauthorised attempt by any software to connect with the internet. When I connected today to the Vimeo website using Chrome, the browser made 31 separate connections to its HQ before landing me on the Vimeo home page. Safari made none.

It's also worth pointing out that for all the PITA that the YouTube codec/Safari meltdown undoubtedly is, there are other areas of video playback where Chrome is out of the loop and Safari is in. For example, I need Safari (and the latest High Sierra Os) to view HDR video of any size and also to play back any video which is larger than 4k; Not that there are many of those around or that many people have the rig to view them.

But I would rather not watch online video at all than submit to Chrome's excessive data mining.

 

[rdonson]

Very good points and worth understanding. Chrome is Google, Google owns YouTube, and Google scans all G-mail accounts for data mining and other purposes. Facebook has been caught pants down with collecting and selling user data but many don’t know that Google is much worse in this regard, and always has been. Those using Google Search are are also tracked and data mined to assist in development of targeted advertising. From a personal security stand point Google is the most dangerous of them all.

Google stopped scanning email for advertising purposes. It does scan email though for spam and malware and they do a **** good job of it.

You’re not only tracked on the internet but also by your ISP, cell phone provider and even your TV. Every smart phone photo that you share online imbeds your GPS location. Every cell tower knows who you are and logs your identity and location.

We all leak information about ourselves constantly. From a personal security perspective... how many of you use a VPN? Use AdBlockers? Use EFF Privacy Badger? Etc, etc, etc

 

[YuKay]

7 mins of test footage for Follow Me/Watch Me aficionados:

 

[PatR]

Google stopped scanning email for advertising purposes. It does scan email though for spam and malware and they do a **** good job of it.

You’re not only tracked on the internet but also by your ISP, cell phone provider and even your TV. Every smart phone photo that you share online imbeds your GPS location. Every cell tower knows who you are and logs your identity and location.

We all leak information about ourselves constantly. From a personal security perspective... how many of you use a VPN? Use AdBlockers? Use EFF Privacy Badger? Etc, etc, etc

Ron,

I spent over 12 years in the world of surveillance, collecting data to generate actionable targets. Associated with the collection of data was being constantly advised by other analytical groups of how our data was/is being collected and how to defend against it. You are 100% correct that everyone “on the grid” is almost defenseless from the practice, especially where data collection by governments is concerned, but we don’t have to maintain an open door policy for hackers, advertisers, and social engineering entities.

As you mentioned, it requires some individual effort but simple things like turning off GPS and location services, using ad blockers, setting up security and privacy settings, clearing cookies and browser history, careful selection of browsers, not posting our family trees and all their activities on social media, never posting photos of ourselves, and for the smart people, using cell phones that permit battery removal, all help reduce the amount of collected data. Funny thing about cell phones, if a battery inside has enough charge to activate the phone, when other conditions are in play every bit of data it contains can be remotely extracted in just a few seconds.

It’s not “convenient” to take the steps needed to defend ourselves but easy collection of personal data is dependent on people placing convenience over personal data security. People will give away everything on a silver platter just to make things a little easier for themselves.

As for Google, I’ll argue they didn’t stop anything but are just concealing those activities better, just as Facebook has done.

 

[Rubik]

7 mins of test footage for Follow Me/Watch Me aficionados:

Thanks for finding and posting, YuKay.
Did you notice the occasional pixel bunching as the crops passed by? Virtually every pixel changed for every frame. That's a lot to record. Otherwise pretty smooth. I wish he had locked white balance, though.

 

[YuKay]

I did notice, Rubik, but I was watching in Safari so dismissed it - and I wasn't sufficiently motivated by the content to switch to another browser (fields ad nauseam seemed a bit like watching paint dry).

 

[Rubik]

Let's do the math. Assume the video was recorded at 3840x2160x60fps and 8-bit color and every pixel changes with every frame. 3840x2160 = 8.3 million pixels/frame, times 24 bits/pixel (3 colors x 8 bits/color) = 200 Mbits/frame, times 60 frames/sec = 12,000 Mb/s. Even at a recording rate of 100 Mb/s, there's a whole lot of compression required. This is an extreme example but illustrates how even this high quality video can have clearly visible compression artifacts. Am I missing anything here?

 

[rdonson]

Ron,

I spent over 12 years in the world of surveillance, collecting data to generate actionable targets. Associated with the collection of data was being constantly advised by other analytical groups of how our data was/is being collected and how to defend against it. You are 100% correct that everyone “on the grid” is almost defenseless from the practice, especially where data collection by governments is concerned, but we don’t have to maintain an open door policy for hackers, advertisers, and social engineering entities.

As you mentioned, it requires some individual effort but simple things like turning off GPS and location services, using ad blockers, setting up security and privacy settings, clearing cookies and browser history, careful selection of browsers, not posting our family trees and all their activities on social media, never posting photos of ourselves, and for the smart people, using cell phones that permit battery removal, all help reduce the amount of collected data. Funny thing about cell phones, if a battery inside has enough charge to activate the phone, when other conditions are in play every bit of data it contains can be remotely extracted in just a few seconds.

It’s not “convenient” to take the steps needed to defend ourselves but easy collection of personal data is dependent on people placing convenience over personal data security. People will give away everything on a silver platter just to make things a little easier for themselves.

As for Google, I’ll argue they didn’t stop anything but are just concealing those activities better, just as Facebook has done.

As you say security is a personal responsibility. The vast majority of internet and smart phone users have no interest in taking the precautions necessary to protect themselves because they can’t be bothered to do anything. It’s much easier to hurl unsubstantiated claims and rumors about who’s doing what. Most aren’t even concerned about the cyber attacks by state actors from China, Russia or even Iran.

 

[YuKay]

Let's do the math. Assume the video was recorded at 3840x2160x60fps and 8-bit color and every pixel changes with every frame. 3840x2160 = 8.3 million pixels/frame, times 24 bits/pixel (3 colors x 8 bits/color) = 200 Mbits/frame, times 60 frames/sec = 12,000 Mb/s. Even at a recording rate of 100 Mb/s, there's a whole lot of compression required. This is an extreme example but illustrates how even this high quality video can have clearly visible compression artifacts. Am I missing anything here?

There's added stress from the speed of the drone which increases the number of new pixels in every frame. But the camera codec still can still generate plenty of inter-frames when the subject remains similar from frame to frame so it wouldn't be a case of writing 8.3m pixels for every frame. Even so, at 60fps it's a big ask and I think I noticed some missing frames as well as some artifacts. But overall, I think the camera did a pretty good job under the circumstances and most of the time my freeze frames looked very good.

 

[PatR]

Most aren’t even concerned about the cyber attacks by state actors from China, Russia or even Iran.

Which are the most dangerous. Our own beloved OPM really screwed the pooch where protecting the data of 25 million+ people from Chinese hackers was concerned.

 

[YuKay]

Scenic first test flight (4k60fps) by Ville Skyscape Luoto: