You completed your checks before you got to the site. You done your initial check of the actual flying area.
It’s now time to start looking more closely at your equipment and the very first checks you do when you start flying just before you go off and filming.
One of the first things you should do is look at the light in the area and decide what density filter you should use for your neutral density filter and your camera.
These are the things that help stop jello.
They’re about the most effective bit of kit that you could have on your camera to stop the Jello.
It’s very bright and you want a strong neutral density filter would have it sort of sunset or sunrise time and you can warn one of your weakest neutral density filters to decide what the right one is and then to fix it you will go pro.
With that in place you now need to do a check over your equipment itself to look for any issues that may be obviously there.
Check all the wiring and the connections any plugs that are in place.
Are they correctly plugged in.
And do they look secure.
Look at the props.
Make sure that there are no nicks in the props which may cause jello that may have occurred whilst you’ve been travelling to the site.
Check that all the antenna are screwed in firmly.
These are one of the typical things that will come loose in flight.
If they’re not been screwed in firmly with disastrous consequences turn your GoPro on and set it to start recording.
If you’ve got a compass built into your machine such as on the nazer we are going to be flying in GP mode then you would need to calibrate that initially in any new flying site so go through that routine.
So you’ve got the best chance of that working properly.
Then you’re going to do your hover check when you first start take off.
Make sure that there’s no significant drift with your machine as it’s hovering in GP s mode.
Also check that any video signal that’s coming back from it.
If you’re flying in first person view is being correctly picked up by your goggles or your screen.
And with that done then ready to go off and start filming.
Once you’ve completed your first flight and in between each other flight that you make is a few things you need to do to make sure that you have successful additional flights.
The first is around battery management.
I always put a bit of tape on the plug socket of my batteries once they’re fully charged and then I only take them off when I’m ready to start using them.
That’s how I make sure that I don’t end up in the air with an empty battery pack which used to happen which is obviously exceptionally annoying.
You can do something similar if you got multiple GoPro batteries which I also advise.
When you get your footage back on the ground from the flight.
I highly recommend that you have some mechanism of backing it up.
That might be a laptop in place.
This is particularly important of course when you’re going on those critical flying missions.
There’s nothing more annoying than if you’ve ended up having to lose your quad for some reason when you also lost the footage as well.
Check the lecture notes section for a full list of all of these pre-flight checks and in-flight management activities that you should be going through.
So at the end of this you started to collect lots of footage to put into your final production for the rest of this course.
We’re going to look at design principles to how we should pull that footage together and also how to use software effectively to make something truly fantastic.
Lifestyle Project 