Review: DJI Phantom Quadcopter

I have always been a fan of remote controlled devices. When I came across the DJI Phantom I was immediately sold. This not too expensive quadcopter can carry a GoPro camera and has built in GPS to make sure your camera returns safely back to you. I already own a GoPro Hero 2 and in combination with the Phantom you can shoot really cool footage.

Assembled Phantom and the rest of the box content.

Features of the Phantom

The Phantom is stable and easy to fly. It will just hover when you release the controls unlike RC helicopters which need constant adjustments during flight to stay in the same spot. That makes it ideal to take pictures and film. Thanks to the GPS it will even counter any wind and won't drift off. The more pro pilots can disable this feature and just have the altitude regulated or can disable any correction features all together and fly it fully manual.

The Phantom has great orientation lights. The Red and green LEDs give you a clear sense of direction, even when flying high up. They also make it possible to fly it at night.

To avoid disaster, the Phantom has some nice failsafes built in. It returns to your lift off location if the connection between your controller and the Phantom fails (provided you have good GPS reception). It also will go in landing mode when the batteries are nearly depleted instead of just dropping out of the sky when the voltage isn't high enough anymore.

A full charge will give you between 10 to 15 minutes of flight depending on the load it is carrying. The maximum speed is about 10 m/s.

What's in the box (or at least in mine)?

• A quick start manual V1.0
• The Phantom quadcopter
• Two legs of landing gear with built in compass
• A white remote control
• 4 sets of propellors
• 2 sets of decals
• A special mount for the the GoPro camera
• 1 LyPo battery
• A balance charger with a set of universal plugs
• Screws to mount the landing gear
• A small wrench and 4 nuts to screw on the propellors
• A USB extension cable
• A spare USB convertor (USB to Micro USB)

The guys from DJI promise that it takes only minimal effort to assemble and getting the Phantom ready to fly.

Getting the Phantom ready to make its first flight.

The first thing you need to do is to read the manual. Although there is the promise of getting the Phantom quickly into the air, this is by no means a simple device and can become a potential hazard. Fast rotating propellors, even made of plastic, are dangerous. I don't recommend kids flying this thing.

A good source of information next to the quick start guide is the DJI website. You can find extra manuals, video's and the software to calibrate the compass and IMU. The software is unfortunately Windows only.

Before you do the calibration and assembly it is wise to start charging the battery. The charging cycle takes about 1 to 2 hours so it is a good idea to get that underway while you prepare the rest of the Phantom.

Calibration of the IMU

The heart of the Phantom is a NAZA-M + GPS multi-rotor auto pilot system. Part of that system is the IMU. It interprets the built in gyroscopes, accelerometers and the external compass. It is important to calibrate this system because faulty interpretation of the flight data might crash your Phantom.

You need a charged battery to start the calibration process. Always turn on the remote control first and then connect the battery to the Phantom.

The calibration is done by connecting the Phantom with the provided USB cable to the software. It is also wise at this stage to upgrade to the latest firmware and to start out with the standard calibration file which can also be downloaded from the DJI site.

You can also test the response of the remote control and recalibrate it if necessary. When all the updates and calibrations are done it is time to assemble the rest of the parts.

Phantom assembly

There are two plastic legs which need to be mounted on the body with four screws each to form the landing gear. One of the legs has the compass module on it and it needs to be connected with the 5-pin cable so data can be passed onto the IMU. The manual states that this step can be done after IMU calibration but the video shows it is better to screw on the legs and connect the compass before the calibration.

At this stage you can also screw on the connector plate for the GoPro camera if you're planning to film during flights.

The last bits to be assembled are the propellors. There are two different types so it is very important that you screw on the right propellor on the right motor. There are arrow marks on the Phantom and the propellors to make sure you screw on the right one. Make sure they are well tightened. Losing a propellor in mid flight is a fast but fatal way to land the Phantom. 

Calibration of the compass and the first flight

The last step is to calibrate the compass. It is best to do this outside, away from large pieces of metal or magnetic sources. It is one of the steps I neglected a bit and my Phantom wouldn't fly because of it. Remember the process to turn on the remote control first and only then connect the battery to the Phantom. The other way around will give you an error message.

It is possible that the compass is so out of wack that it can't be calibrated with the regular procedure. Through one of the video's I have learned you can get it back straight with a magnet.

Once this is all done you are ready for your first flight.

My personal experience

I am not great with reading manuals. I want to dive in immediately which is actually not a very good idea with a machine as complex as the Phantom. As stated above, read the manual first. I did skip some sections and later on I wondered why the Phantom didn't want to fly.

There was also a bit of confusion concerning the box content. It didn't match the manuals and the video's I have seen online. I did get 2 sets of spare rotor blades instead of 1 but you won't see me complaining about that.

My remote control is also different. It has an extra lever on the back and the throttle control is automatically centered. This was really confusing as one of the important steps for lift off is setting the throttle stick all the way down. This is impossible when a spring centers it. I even opened up the controller to see what was wrong with it. It was only after searching several online forums that I figured out I had the new controller type which they only starting shipping recently. The extra lever on the back is usable as a controller for tilting an optional gimbal.

The last problem I had was the connection between remote control and the Phantom. Although the Phantom itself indicated that there was a connection to the remote control, the software was unable to detect it. The remote control is supposed to be of the PPM type and this is also the default value in the standard calibration file. It was only after changing to D-Bus that it started to work. Again, the forums helped me figure out that this updated controller behaves a bit different. The documentation wasn't updated though which lead to this long search. 

It went all smoothly once I had it into the air. Well, except for landing that is. My first landings were a bit rough and I did cut some grass with the propellors. Once I figured out how to do it, I had no issues whatsoever.

Always check the weather forecasts for the wind speeds. Once it gets too windy, the Phantom really needs to fight it to stay in the same spot, becomes highly unstable and might crash. Since it's maximum speed is 10 m/s I tend not to fly when the wind is blowing faster than 8 m/s.

As you can see, it wasn't a complete walk in the park to get it into the air. Luckily the Phantom is very popular and there are many forums on which you can find a ton of information or ask questions to other Phantom owners. Overall I am very happy with the Phantom. I got mine for 419€.

Flying the Phantom with the GoPro Hero2

Using the GoPro Hero 2 to take pictures. I did some basic grading and removed the lens distortion.

The Phantom is designed to fly with the GoPro Hero3 in mind. That said, it also works with previous models like the Hero2. When checking other people's footage I noticed there was a consensus among all Phantom and GoPro owners that the footage had problems with what they call the jello effect. This is because of micro vibrations that get transferred from the Phantom to the camera during flight. It makes the footage rather unusable for anything professional.

There are a couple of things you can do to avoid this effect.

You can do it the expensive way by getting a gimbal. This is by far the best option and gives extra benefits like camera tilt control. The gimbal is more expensive than the Phantom so it wasn't an option for me (for the time being at least).

Another option is to put some foam or rubber between the Phantom and the connection piece for the camera. This will absorb some of the micro vibrations. This did work for me and it removed them to an acceptable level although not completely.

A last trick is to balance the propellors by sanding off excess weight of one side. There are some handy balancing gizmos on the market which makes it easy enough to get it right. So far I haven't tried this option myself as I was making rough landings which wasn't great for the propellors. Every time you damage your propellors a bit they might become unbalanced again and you have to start all over again.

Some last tips to get better footage and photos.

It is good practice to shoot at 50 (or 60) fps. The footage will look more stable when slowing it down to 25 (or 30) fps during the edit.

It is better to use the camera housing which ships with your GoPro Camera. It protects it from impact should you crash your Phantom.

Another trick to stabilize your footage it to use After Effects Warp Stabilizer. You will loose some resolution but it works like a charm.

The GoPro has quite a bit of lens distortion. This is something you want to get rid of when just shooting still images. Camera Raw which is accessible trough Adobe Bridge has built in lens profiles for the Hero3. Using the Hero3 silver setting also works for the Hero2 camera. This eliminates the lens distortion and is great when shooting panorama's or buildings.

Links:

DJI website

PhantomPilots forum: A great place to get help from other Pilots

How we made Toilet Run

Toilet Run is Belgian Boomsticks' second production.

The idea

Queueing for a public toilet is something which happens to all of us now and then but is never pleasant when you need to go urgently. It gets worse when it is out of order and you need to find another one. What happens when it becomes a race to get there first but the path to it is full of obstacles?

Since all obstacles are in different locations we wanted to have something which tied it all together. Using the map with the animated heads was the ideal solution to avoid discontinuity in environments. All obstacles are merely accidents. We didn't want them to be induced by direct rivalry between the two characters.

Equipment

We used almost the same camera and sound equipment as with Agent Orange (check this link) but we did have some extra ropes en rigs to get over the ditch. The rope was a regular  climbing rope and we had an issue getting reasonable tension on it. Without tension Jef-Aram would get wet feet rather quickly. Luckily we had a Grigri with us, which helped us tighten the rope. We know that this is not the proper way of using a Grigri but it worked and that is all what matters when you need to shoot stuff in a couple of hours time.

Again we tried to use the GoPro to get some nice shots on the cables but  the shots didn't work that well. It is better to cut them out as bad shots would bring the quality down a lot. I guess we still need to train more on how to position the GoPro camera. The lack of a viewfinder just doesn't make it easy.

Music and Sound FX

We tapped again into our royalty free library of music and sound FX but this time we also added more of our own foley recordings. All cloth movement and some impacts were done by us. We noticed that when two objects collide you do not need one sound but two. Both objects have their own distinguished sound. The truck hitting Jef-Aram is a combination of a metal sound from the body of the truck and a human impact sound. This makes it much more dramatic.

Post Production

The first small bits to fix were the toilets. As a matter of fact those are not toilets at all but electricity booths. The first one was solved practically with the"out of order" messages. On the second one we painted out the voltage signs and added a toilet sign in After Effects.

A bit of more work was the map. We designed one big map in illustrator and colored it in Photoshop. The colored map was then taken into After Effects for the animation. In the end we showed only a fraction of the map in the clip. It was useful to draw the whole map as it gave us more continuity while editing.

The full map. Click to enlarge.

The biggest challenge in compositing was the truck hitting Jef-Aram. We first wanted to hit him with me driving a car but since all the obstacles were more things that just happened as accidents instead of direct rivalry, that seemed too violent. We decided to go for a truck instead of a car as the impact would be more dramatic. The problem was that we didn't know anybody at all who could drive us a truck. At first we were thinking of using an image of a truck but that idea was quickly ditched as we realized there is no perspective change on a translating image. So we jumped in the car and drove around an industry area where lots of trucks pass by. Most people are not too happy getting caught on camera so instead of filming a truck passing by we drove by a parked truck ourselves. This gives exactly the same result in perspective change. After some rotowork and color grading the truck fitted right in.

A still of the truck while driving past it. Just using a photo of a truck would never have the right perspective change while driving by.

The truck moves so fast that it was not even necessary to animate the wheels properly to make the effect convincing enough. Luckily for us the weather was the same as on the day of shooting the electricity booths. The cloudy sky provides soft shadows in both images.

What's next?

Jef-Aram and I are already working on our next short. Make sure to stay tuned. You can do this by following us on twitter or by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Links:

Belgian Boomsticks YouTube Channel

Jef-Aram's Blog

Frederic's Twitter Page

Jef-Aram's Twitter Page

Review: GoPro HD HERO2

The GoPro camera's are immensely popular. These low cost, tiny and robust camera's are quite unique and since I use one of them for my hobby projects I have decided to give it a review. 

There are three editions available for the GoPro HD HERO2 which are the Outdoor, motorsports and surf edition. I purchased the motorsports one as it comes with a suction cup to fix it to windows and other smooth surfaces like cars.

What's in the box of the motorsports edition

The content of the motorsports edition.

• 1 GoPro HD HERO2 camera
• 1 Waterproof housing
• 1 HD skeleton back door
• 1 Lithium Ion battery
• 1 Suction cup mount
• J-Hook buckle
• 2 Curved adhesive mounts
• 3 Flat adhesive mounts
• 1 three way pivot arm
• 1 USB cable
• 1 Booklet with instructions
• 3 GoPro stickers (for the real fans)

GoPro does not deliver an SD card with the package so make sure you order one yourself. I got myself a SanDisk Extreme HD Video (30 MB/s) 16GB which does a fine job at recording HD video and images.

The camera

The camera compared to the size of a 1 Euro coin, 1 Pound coin and a Quarter coin. Also check out the informative display.

The back of the camera with the Lithium Ion battery popped out. (I blurred out the serial number).

Most important part of the whole kit is the camera. It is small and lightweight and could easily fit in your pocket although I do not recommend so as it might damage the lens. The housing is made from sturdy plastic which feels soft to the touch. There are two buttons to control it, an informational LCD screen, a built in microphone, an HDMI out, a TV out, a USB connector and a jack for an external mic. At the back there is also an interface to connect an extra battery pack or LCD view screen which can be purchased as options. There are also four red LEDs which inform you if the camera is filming.

Some specs for the techies (yeah, I always like specs):

• 11 megapixel sensor
• f/2.8 fixed focus
• 170, 127 and 90 degrees field of view
• PAL and NTSC frame rates.
• 1080p at 25fps (PAL) and 30 fps (NTSC)
• 960p at 25fps, 50fps (PAL) and 30fps, 48fps (NTSC)
• 720p at 25fps, 50fps (PAL) and 30fps, 60fps (NTSC)
• WVGA (848x480) at 50fps, 100fps (PAL) and 60fps, 120fps (NTSC)

The camera records in the H.264 codec which is similar to a DSLR.

You might have noticed the different frame rates with PAL and NTSC. Although in the old days PAL and NTSC used to be incompatible because of different resolutions and frame rates it does not matter too much anymore. As long as you are aware at which frame rate you you are shooting all will be ok. So if shooting slow motion and the end result needs to be 25fps you might as well pick 120 fps as it might give a nicer result.

The battery can be charged trough the USB cable but you need the camera to do so. You need to get the optional battery back pack if you want to charge the battery without the camera.

The USB cable is also used to unload the movies and images or you can always take the memory card out and put it in a card reader.
The image quality is quite crisp and clear in daylight situations. It is only at low light that imagery becomes noisy but then again most camera's have that problem. It is impossible to change the ISO value, shutter speed and aperture on this camera.

The interface

The interface has had quite an upgrade from the old HERO camera. There is some true readable information now instead of just seeing a digit. This increases the user friendliness as you do not have to carry a manual with you at all times.

It also displays useful information such as how much remaining space there is on your memory card, at which resolution and speed you are filming, the battery status and if the camera is in filming mode or picture mode.

The front button moves you trough the menu while the top button is used for selections or starting/stopping the camera.

Not only can you film but there are also several options to capture still images:

• Single
• 10 frames burst
• Time lapse
• Self timer

Accessories in the box

The accessories give abundant options on how to attach and point your camera. The pivot arm has big enough handles to tighten and loosening the joints so no screw driver needed to change the configuration.

I haven't tried the self adhesive mounts yet so I can't tell you if they stick well or not.

The waterproof housing is very sturdy and keeps the camera clean in dirty or wet situations. The two buttons are easily accessible with big buttons from the outside so no need to take it out every time you start or stop it. 

My experience

Again, the new interface is a huge improvement to its usability. I worked with the old one before and it was always a problem if you didn't have the manual with you unless your brain is good at memorizing these things. With the HERO2 there is no more memorizing what those digits mean but clear information on how the camera is set up. The display also shows a timer when shooting and how many clips are already on the memory card.

The interface sound is on by default but I find the bleeps rather annoying so it is possible to turn it off in the settings menu. You have to dig deep into the menus to find the option but then again it is impossible to have an extensive accessibility with only two buttons and it is not something you have to change all the time.

The recorded sound is really muffled when the camera is in the waterproof housing. Make sure to use the skeleton back door if your sound quality needs to be better but keep in mind that it is no longer waterproof when you do so.

The menu's on the display are clear and readable although the LCD is not back lit so make sure to have a light ready in low light situations if you need to change some settings.

The suction cup works great. Do remember to clean your surfaces before attaching it. Dust can decrease the suction strength over time as air might seep in. And although the waterproof housing is incredibly strong and protects the camera really well, it is never fun when it falls off while driving a car.

We also have great fun with the high frame rate option. Unfortunately not at full HD but still a great option to have when doing crazy stuff like jumps. I think there are almost no cameras at this price point which can shoot at 100 fps at this moment in time.

A drawback is that you can't see what you are filming exactly so framing can be tricky. GoPro has thought of this and provides a LCD backpack which makes that possible. Keep in mind that the LCD screen lowers the battery performance.

The battery lasts about two to three hours which is not that long and the camera does get a bit hot while in operation so do not be alarmed when that happens.

Price/Value

The camera is priced at $299 when ordering from their site. I bought mine in the local shop at  309 Euro. I think the camera is very good value for money considering what you can do with it. Exposure is completely automatic so not much control there but the electronics inside do a pretty good job at getting it right.

The camera itself is also quite sturdy as I had a colleague dropping his camera into the water without the waterproof housing and after extensive drying it did still work (maybe he was just plain lucky).