Photo and timelapse question..

SROlmeda · Mar 3, 2016

Two quick questions. Ive tried this many times but it never works, if you press both preset buttons at the same time, its supposed to snap a picture, does this work for everyone?
Timelapse, how can this option be accessed on the solo app? Wanted to try it out today but i didnt find the settings for it (latest firmware on both the gopro hero 4 black and solo). Thanks!

Joe Horn · Mar 3, 2016

Timelapse can't be started or controlled in the air by the current version of the Solo app. You have to start it manually on the camera itself before taking off, and just let it keep running throughout the flight. The video feed may be annoying, but it's better than flying blind.

Soul Patch Films · Mar 3, 2016

Too take a photo, of course, change gopro to photo mode, then depress the gimbal angle switch.

pete · Mar 3, 2016

SROlmeda said:
Two quick questions. Ive tried this many times but it never works, if you press both preset buttons at the same time, its supposed to snap a picture, does this work for everyone?
Timelapse, how can this option be accessed on the solo app? Wanted to try it out today but i didnt find the settings for it (latest firmware on both the gopro hero 4 black and solo). Thanks!

there are 2 different concepts of time lapse with Solo :
a) GoPro built-in timelapse funtion, as Joe mentioned above you can't activate it in-flight, you have to start it before take-off
- this form of time lapse doesn't work for me, if you are taking shots every X-seconds and Solo travels certain distance between each shot, the motion becomes all jerky. watching your screen the Solo movement may seem nice and smooth and it's not noticeable when the Solo moves little bit left/right/up/down but when you record time lapse this way, the movement is all jumpy.

b) Smart shot time lapse - this is actually video and not a time lapse in true sense, you set up your Smart shot (MPCC) and under options select very slow cruising speed. resulting video resembles time lapse sequence in every way because the motion is super smooth, except that movement of non-stationary objects (people, cars, clouds,...) are non-time lapse like.

and yes, to take photo you can use the left gimbal paddle control (quick click) but I found it bit unreliable - every time I try to depress it I accidentally tilt the gimbal up or down.
you can take photo more reliably from your Solo App (clicking the white circle) when in photo mode

Kalvin · Mar 20, 2016

pete said:
there are 2 different concepts of time lapse with Solo :
a) GoPro built-in timelapse funtion, as Joe mentioned above you can't activate it in-flight, you have to start it before take-off
- this form of time lapse doesn't work for me, if you are taking shots every X-seconds and Solo travels certain distance between each shot, the motion becomes all jerky. watching your screen the Solo movement may seem nice and smooth and it's not noticeable when the Solo moves little bit left/right/up/down but when you record time lapse this way, the movement is all jumpy.

b) Smart shot time lapse - this is actually video and not a time lapse in true sense, you set up your Smart shot (MPCC) and under options select very slow cruising speed. resulting video resembles time lapse sequence in every way because the motion is super smooth, except that movement of non-stationary objects (people, cars, clouds,...) are non-time lapse like.

and yes, to take photo you can use the left gimbal paddle control (quick click) but I found it bit unreliable - every time I try to depress it I accidentally tilt the gimbal up or down.
you can take photo more reliably from your Solo App (clicking the white circle) when in photo mode

There is another concept that I haven't tried. It's manually changing the mode on the GoPro HERO4 to Time Lapse or Night Lapse photo before takeoff, then starting the capture with the gimbal paddle button or the Solo App capture button. I believe this can even be used with MPCC at slow cruising speed. I'll try it some time and post some results.

Have you tried using the gimbal paddle sandwiched between two fingers? For me, it makes pressing the gimbal paddle button have less of an accidental motion to tilt the gimbal paddle up or down.

pete · Mar 21, 2016

Kalvin said:
Have you tried using the gimbal paddle sandwiched between two fingers?

good idea, I'll try it this way.

as for using GoPro timelapse function, I did try it but the results were not great, even at just 5 secs interval the Solo deviates slightly on any of the 3 axis or there could be slight roll, when you are recording video at 30fps you don't notice this, but at single frames 5 secs apart it introduces "jumpy" time lapse sequence. this is same if you imagine doing time lapse on a fixed motorized slider and you accidentally bump the slider between 2 frames, and then you bump the slider again after each frame, that's the sort of result you get when doing traditional time lapse on drone.

I don't know what's the lowest cruising speed I've done in MPCC, I think the longest time setting I had was 8 minutes and I think you can't go much over 10 minutes, because it takes time to move to your start location, then setup the settings on Solo App, do the MPCC and time to return home with lets say 25% battery left, 10 minutes for the low speed MPCC is just about right. You get 120 frames at 5 secs interval shooting, that's 4 seconds of video in final production, not much useful anyway.

I get much better results using the Solo App timelapse feature and then reprocessing the video to 240 fps (using every frame from the original 30fps footage), this speeds up the video 8x and looks great and smooth on computer, the problem is if you want to export it to Youtube or Vimeo as they support only 60fps max, so you need to convert your final smooth video to 60fps and in doing so your Youtube version will lose 75% of the frames and it never looks the same as the 240fps version on your computer.
The Apple Compressor application actually does quite well to compensate for the lost frames, you get sort of reasonable motion blur doing it this way, I may post a sample here...

pete · Mar 21, 2016

Here is a short sample video created as described in my above post. The final video is 22 secs, from a 3 minute flight, so you should be able to get 1m15s time lapse video from a 10min smooth low cruising speed MPCC.
The moving cars in this video give you a sense of time lapse.
Try to play it at HQ (1080p 60fps).

Time lapse (Test) GoPro Hero 3+ black with stock lens.
GoPro settings : 2.7k, medium FOV, 30fps
Converted to 240fps (8x speed) and then exported to Youtube at 60fps (keeping 8x speed) hence losing 75% of the frames.

Folarin Alakija · Apr 13, 2016

pete said:
Here is a short sample video created as described in my above post. The final video is 22 secs, from a 3 minute flight, so you should be able to get 1m15s time lapse video from a 10min smooth low cruising speed MPCC.
The moving cars in this video give you a sense of time lapse.
Try to play it at HQ (1080p 60fps).

Time lapse (Test) GoPro Hero 3+ black with stock lens.
GoPro settings : 2.7k, medium FOV, 30fps
Converted to 240fps (8x speed) and then exported to Youtube at 60fps (keeping 8x speed) hence losing 75% of the frames.

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