Need help writing an HDR 360 photo plan

Andrew Busst

Having successfully adapted the 360pano plan on Dronelink to capture both manual and auto exposure 360 panos capturing the maximum gimbal range I thought I would try my hand at adapting it to a 360 HDR Pano as here...

https://app.dronelink.com/andrew-busst/public/plan/woC3bglV2FoLp71GpWUa

HOWEVER I ran this afternoon and I had two problems.

EV ADJUSTMENT

My goal is to manually set the fastest exposure by adding an initial spin in the plan which tells me to pause the plan then adjust exposure (pointing at the brightest subject then adjusting the shutter speed accordingly (Mavic mini apaerture fixed at f2.8) then resume the plan and for each frame in the 360 HDR Pano take three shots.

The first shot will be at whatever I set the shutter speed at manually.

The second shot will take an image a 2 EV higher than the first shot

The third shot will take an image at 4 EV higher 

The plan then will as part of the first shot in every following set of three will subtract 4 EV to get back to my initial exposure set manually.

I thought I could alter that using the "Camera Compensation Step Command" BUT it doesn't seem to be working. It just takes all exposures at the shutter speed  I set manually.

So how do I get Dronelink to alter the shutter speed up or down 2,4 or -2,-4 stops without physically entering the shutter speed as it will change depending on the day and conditions?

I'm using Manual Exposure and Android S9

 

TELEMETRY ERROR

When I first adapted the plan there was a lot of exposures and the time of the plan started to creep up. So I went through all the heading components and changed the time from 1 sec to 0 secs to speed up. 

When I run this plan after a few exposures I get a message saying "Telemetry Error mission paused" (or something like that) and the drone stops (doesn't lock up just pauses the plan). Could this change in speed cause the issue? It runs beautifully in the mission preview and I have cut the time right down.

Any help really appreciated as I felt I was on a real roll until trying to write this.

Many thanks in advance

 

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Comments

11 comments

Date Votes
  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst

    I think I have solved one issue the "Telemetry Delayed" messages I'm getting I think are from my setting of 21M for max altitude which is the height I hit before I am higher than a bank between an airport and my location and I'm flying at 20M so I'm picking the drone is popping up into that ceiling and causing the error "Telemetry Delayed" I have read elsewhere about set Max Distances impacting that. I'll test tomorrow.

    Still looking for a way to change Shutter speed by 2 or 4 stops up or down when on manual exposure. If there is is no way of doing it I might have to labour through and have 20 or so plans based on 2500/s  starting point then 2000/s and so on and just change the shutter speed manually through the shots for each stage of the pano. That's a huge job but I only have to do it once and that is the beauty of dronelink. It may take some time but you can create complex operations but you only have to do it once...

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  • Comment author
    RAUL

    Following your post with really interest.
    I think AEB is essential to capture the full dynamic range in a 360 photo.
    This weekend I will try to test if I can make a plan 360+AEB that works.
    Please community, let's go for it!

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  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst

    I'm pretty sure SDK for Mavic doesn't have AEB so I have resigned myself to designing about 20 plans labelled 5000, 4000, 3000, 2500 and so on with the 5000 being 1/5000 and representing the fastest speed necessary to capture highlights.

    Plan will be to go up manually with the drone find out what shutter speed is tops to capture detail so if it's 1/2500 I'll then go back down choose that plan and DL will run taking first shot of every pano at 1/2500 then 1/1250 then 1/625 

    Lots of work but only have to do once!! :-) Would be so cool if you could open the plans in a word editor and do find/replace would make writing them so much faster!

    So todo for this weekend..

    • Get HDR plan to run under a quicker timeframe removing any time in the Heading components
    • Get the SHUTTER SPEED CHANGE command to work 

    If I can get those two working I'm good to go.

    Cheers 

     

     

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  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst

    Great news!!!! I successfully ran a HDR 360 Pano test (as above) today with a just a couple of small problems...

    • TELEMETRY DELAYED
    • One of the reasons this pops up is because you hit the limits set in DJI Fly. I think this resets each time as I'm sure I raised it yesterday from 20M altitude to 120M but it was again showing as 20M today. This may have been an issue all along and I don't recall DJI Fly doing this before but to avoid issues before you run DL run DJI Fly and make sure your distance altitude and lateral distance limits ar far enough away. Once I did that Telemetry Delayed went away.
    • I had it built into my plan as a command to change max altitude to 130M but I had it at the end!! Now at the start so should sort.

     

    • USE THE RIGHT SHUTTER SPEED
    • So in my test I ran 3 exposures for each shot 1/4000 starting shot which captures brightest parts of scene, 1/1000 two stops over exposed and 1/250 another two stops over exposed so a spread of 4 stops all up. 
    • Trouble was the Mini doesn't use 1/250 it uses 1/240 so it didn't change the exposure on that third shot. But now I know I can rewrite and the next time I run this I think it will be perfect.
    • Would still be nice to change the shutter speed x number of clicks up or down as a command.

    So my amended plan for a sunny day starting with 4000 f 2.8 is here

    https://app.dronelink.com/andrew-busst/public/plan/b60WV7GeC0sSPw3ANNq6

    I have yet to finally test this but expect it to work fine.

    Once done I am going to write about 20 variations to cover the exposure range I'm also going to add a request to amend the Shutter Speed Command to include an absolute and relative option so you can have a shutter speed x number of stops up or down from current.

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  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst

    Success wahoo! So just ran my amended plan and went perfectly. 87 HDR images taken in about 3-4 mins no freezing, no error messages perfect! Just need that ability to relatively change shutter speed and would be perfect....

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  • Comment author
    Eric Goldstein

    Andrew Busst - Great job!

    I'd love to see a resulting picture that I could post and share!

    If you want to share your HDR 360 plan, we can put it up so others can use it.    Woudl love you to do a quick video talking about what you did and showing the result as well.

    Fantastic job!   This is what Dronelink was built to do.

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  • Comment author
    Richard Chesher

    Andrew Busst - How about setting up an account on 360Cities.net - I have my 360 sphere images there and the images are also shown on Google Earth. They can be a bit finicky about accepting the images if there are glitches or faults so you have to be careful on submission. But you'd get great exposure, top quality, and it would help fellow Dronelinkers to see the results of your plan. 

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  • Comment author
    Bjorn

    Hi Andrew, what about setting the "Auto exposure lock" on, and then using the EV value to take the shots?

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  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst
    • Edited

    Hello all

    Here is the result of last night's test. There are some stitching errors (PTGUI) but that is no fault of DL as it was quite windy and the drone was only 20m at this point. To be honest I mainly do panel Panos so this 360 thing is a bit new to me and I'm sure there is an easy way to fill in the 20-90 degree sky gap the Mini can't get to. In any case my thinking is do a 360 and you can chop out any panel pano (horizontal, vertical) you want. But the key thing I'm testing is DL's ability to capture a 4 stop range HDR 360 Pano which it can! :-)  Note: The original TIFF for this was over 576mb the exported jpeg was 112mb so is way reduced in resolution as site takes max of 2mb

    Note: Just added Google Drive link to 112mb copy

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/14dS6SXmpEFTiwigWJn44EyHAHN2MHjR0/view?usp=sharing

    BJORN

    That is brilliant plan! This could save me hours righting a plan to cover app shutter speeds from 1/5000 down to whatever.

    My concerns (I'm going to test this this morning) I always find it most accurate to find the faster exposure needed to capture the brightest highlight first, then subsequent HDR exposures slow the exposure down. So using AEB Auto Exposure lock I'm assuming I'll have to do this...

    • Maybe have in the plan a 360 drone spin to tell me to pause the mission and using DL work out the best exposure for highlights
    • To do that DL would switch the drone into Auto Exposure mode
    • I would then point the drone at the brightest part of the 360 then I guess adjust EV until it has captured the highlight
    • First concern, I'm not sure but what if Mavic Mini doesn't have enough EV stops to allow capture of the highlight?
    • Second concern, say it has enough but what say for whatever reason we are hard up at the + or - end of the allowed Number of EV stops and the plan needs to go beyond those? So say to capture the top highlight on Auto you actually need +1EV and the Mavic is limited to +4EV when the plan runs and tries to shoot at +1EV and add another 4EV it will be 5EV so outside what the drone has.
    • Final concern is does Auto Exposure lock reset after each shot? Anyway I hope to test this today.

    RICHARD

    Thank you for the offer. I'm not really into this 360 thing so I probably won't head to that site (also limited time :-) but if you want I can send you an email and you download the full size jpeg or tiff! and fix the sky bit missing and load up. Just let me know

     

    ERIC

    Thankyou, reduced resolution picture below.

    I think it would be really hard to do a video on this as so much time is just spent looking at the original DL 360 Pano Plan and using lots of trial and error changing it adding stuff and just seeing what happens :-) But here are some valuable learns...

    • The plan preview window showing gimbal movements, drone movements, captures, altitude is so key. The graphical representation allows you to easily see where you have made errors or really importantly where you can optimise the plan. For example the original 360 pano had lots of time gaps which extended the total time of the pano, with an HDR Pano this started approaching 5 mins which is getting up there from a keeping exposure relevant. So being able to chop that down closer to three minutes was good.
    • When writing plans like this I have included RTH heights and Maximum Altitudes in the plan itself but I think that is a mistake and I will take them out when I have the final polished plans. I just think you should always get into the habit of first going into DJI Fly and setting these things every time as your location will change what these should all be depending on subject and surroundings.  Alternatively would be great if DL allowed you to change these settings in the DL app in real time?
    • Always make sure the DJI SDK supports what you are trying to do. i.e Mavic Mini does not support EV changes under manual exposure which is a real issue as I was counting on that! (Eric please see below for Shutter Speed Relative change request!)
    • If your first point of your plan i.e waypoint, destination, approach, command whatever is within 20m of takeoff/homepoint be very careful as if something goes wrong a RTH within 20m will just land your drone where it is which maybe a pond, roof, railroad whatever! If you can, make you flight path for 20m over safe territory. You may be able to control your drone if doing a RTH but I have had mixed experience with that.
    • There are many ways to achieve the same outcome in DL plans so have a play :-)


    ENHANCEMENTS  TO DL THAT WOULD BE REALLY HELPFUL...

    DJI MESSAGES

    If possible to relay MEANINGFUL messages from DJI SDK to show on the DL app would be great e.g Delayed Telemetry in my case actually meant "Duh your maximum height is set for 21m and you are flying at 20m so GPS errors are saying you are currently higher than that so I'm stopping" that would be really helpful :-)

     

    DL PAUSE WITH MESSAGES

    It would be FANTASTIC to have a "Pause and message command" in DL.

    • e.g you are going to take a 360 Pano and you want the mission to pause and display a message "Please adjust shutter speed to capture highlights"
    • e.g you have just taken off or are about to take off "Have you checked RTH and Maximum Distances?"

     

    BE ABLE TO CHANGE DJI SETTINGS

    It would be great to be able to change RTH and Max distances from within DL app

     

    PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE THIS - RELATIVE SHUTTER SPEED CHANGES

    This would save me hours!! Can you change the Camera Shutter Speed command to include the option to alter the shutter speed to a relative number of increments in addition to an absolute shutter speed. For example if doing an HDR and shutter is set to 1/5000 rather than change to 1/1000 can we change 6 increments down to 1/1000 that would allow a really functional one off HDR plan. Note: Mavic Mini has 3 increments per EV DL has 4 so not sure whether you would need to move 8 increments? Maybe DL had an option to change that so you work in 1/4 or 1/3 stops depending on the drone? 

     

    Thanks all! Really enjoying using the DL Software :-) 

    Andrew

     

     

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  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst

    Great news here https://support.dronelink.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360049297373-Amendment-to-shutter-speed-command-for-camera-absolute-or-relative-Manual-Exposure-Mode-?page=1#community_comment_360012502694

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  • Comment author
    Andrew Busst

    Bjorn - Sadly had a play with the Mavic Mini - as soon as you take the first shot Auto Exposure lock is removed so would defeat trying to keep subsequent exposures aligned. 

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