So I thought I’d talk about a little failure… maybe it will save you time in case you’ve had a similar idea!

When you watch this video below, you’ll see a rather failed attempt at a timelapse. I had this bright idea to try hovering the quadcopter (DJI Phantom 4 Pro) in the air for about ten minutes and then have it automatically take a photo every 3 seconds. This is one of the many photo options. Anyway, I did it, but I could tell the quad was moving a bit in the wind (up, down, right, left, forward and back). It was basically like the worst tripod in the world.

Now, the quad will TRY to stay as still as possible. It uses a lot of tech to do this, including over 15 GPS satellites to try to keep it still.

So, I copied all the pictures to a directory then used LRTimelapse to do a bit of tweaking before rendering it. Then, it looked like this:

Then I figured I needed to stabilize it. I found two ways to do it. One would be to auto-align all the images in Photoshop (put them in layers then run a script to export each layer). But that was kind of a Rambo mission for 468 photos. The other way to do it was to use After Effects and “Warp Stabilizer VFX.”

As you can see in the 2nd video below, it still looks pretty ropey. Unusable for me. It’s kind of a cool effect but to me. it just doesn’t feel quite right. Anyway, that’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back… but thought you might enjoy the failed journey anyway! 🙂