Has anyone heard any updates from Pix4D regarding official support of the P4PV2? Specifically on Android.
Not here, but one would certainly be appreciated. Nearly a month now since DJI released the SDK and a week or more since iOS support was made available.
How about it, Pix4D?
It becomes urgent now, I don’t want to spent more money to buy an iPad since I just bought a brandnew P4P V2.00 with cristalsky monitor.
Please help.
Sofie, get the drone deploy trial and flay with that fro a while. It is the only p4p v2 compatible platform I know of that does “grid photo” flying. May be others but I am watching and have not seen any catch up to the v2.
I’ve been able to use my P4 Pro V2.0 with Pix4D but when I have it fly a grid it lands at the end point and not the home point. Luckily I found this out in testing and recovered the drone. Now I know this is an issue I try to make the end point near to the take off point and take control after the mission’s done. Could be a nasty surprise for a new user.
I also noticed the images weren’t that sharp. I did a duplicate run with my Mavic Pro and the images look better.
I’m using IOS 11.4.1 on an iPad mini2, all firmware is up to date.
I tried a flight today with P4D Mapper V 3.3.3 on iPad with the P4Pv2. I had partial success, and had some issues:
Capture App worked for one flight and images were sharp but then when I tried to create other flights and went into the mission settings (to adjust image overlap, gimbal angle etc.) it said “no settings are adjustable for this flight mode”. It said this for ALL flight modes. Makes no sense. Only way I found to recover was to delete the app from my iPad and reinstall. This of course takes time and erases all prior stored flights.
Also - after one seemingly successfully flight I tried to download the images to my iPad from the drone for subsequent uploading to the P4D Cloud Mapper but the app kept aborting. It would just show connected to drone… downloading images, then poof the app closed. I have never seen anything quite like this on iOS.
I reported both of these issues to P4D support, and was informed:
“Thank you for contacting Pix4D technical support. At the moment the Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 is not supported with Pix4Dcapture. DJI’s mobile SDK 4.6 just came out introducing support for the Phantom 4 Pro V2.0, and we are analyzing it and considering the possibility of officially supporting this drone in Pix4Dcapture. Our development team is continually working to implement the new drones but, at the moment, we can not guarantee if the P4P V2.0 will be supported and when.”
So there you have it. That is as of august 9, 2018. Be warned… try to use PIX4D Capture with a Phantom 4 Pro V2 at the moment and you are in uncharted territority. I believe that the iOS versions of DJI GS Pro and Map Pilot by Maps Made Easy fully support the P4Pv2 currently.
Hi all,
Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 is not officially supported yet and then we do not encourage our users to use the Phantom 4 Pro v2.0 with Pix4Dcapture even if the integration of last DJI SDK on iOS allows it.
As the development and testing for its support are still ongoing, you may encounter unexpected behavior when flying. My recommendation here would be to be patient just a little bit longer.
Best,
So we’re a month and a half in from DJI’s release of the SDK and still no Pix4D Capture support for the P4PV2.
Just a quirky and buggy attempt at an iOS solution, nothing for Android, and repeated disclaimers that the only P4 model being sold by DJI is not supported accompanied by pleas that we be patient.
Come on, Pix4D. Get it together. You have a userbase, don’t squander it.
Just another person who is really looking forward to seeing P4Pv2 and Pix4DCapture working together, soon.
Trying to decide whether to keep the RC plus built in CrystalSky screen or send it back for an RC without screen to be able to utilize Pix4DCapture with either Android or iOS. But it sounds like none of these yet works at this point? Does Pix4D know what will be the best option when something is supported, hopefully soon?
Thank you.
Hi all,
From 23/08/2018, on Android, version V4.3.1 has been released together with Phantom 4 Pro V2 support.
The release will come very soon on iOS.
Best,
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Thank you for the update - Looking forward to giving it a try this evening!
That’s great news, thank you!
Looking forward to finally using our V2 with Capture.
Everyone post your experiences here please!
I just tested on a very small mission, because it was getting dark. The program works fine, take off capture land but the pictures are not ok. Due to less light I think. I will try again tomorrow if it is possible.
Sofie - a PIX4D trainer explained to me that PIX4D Capture honors to the existing camera settings (except for the selection to shoot raw). If you configure your settings in with DJI Go 4 to manual mode with your selected ISO, F-stop, and Shutter speed these will be kept for the subsequent PIX4D Capture flight. Be sure to exit DJI Go 4 first however to avoid any potential conflict. Also - it may make sense to set the camera’s focus also to manual focus and set the focus distance to the height of the mapping flight.
I have found good success with excellent images by manually optimizing the camera settings using DJI Go 4 before switching to PIX4D Capture. You may wish to experiment with settings and trial images in DJI Go 4 to get the camera dialed in before flying with PIX4D capture. (A nice enhancement to PIX4D capture would be to display or allow control over the camera settings from the app).
Another consideration is selecting a mapping flight speed that is slow enough to reduce motion blur. If you multiply your shutter speed by the speed of the drone you can calculate the distance the drone will cover over the ground during the exposure. If this is much smaller that your Ground Separation Distance (distance between pixels on ground) then motion blur will not be a factor. For dim light raising the ISO and opening the aperture will allow higher shutter speeds.
I am an iOS user. Although PIX4D Capture is not officially supported on iOS yet I have had some success with my P4Pv2. Image quality has not been an issue when I use the procedure above. I am eagerly waiting for the PIX4D Capture iOS release.
And a warning for those considering the new Mavic Pro 2 for mapping use soon - be careful not to assume quick PIX4D Capture support. The P4Pv2 was released over three months ago and while an ideal platform for mapping it is still not officially supported by PIX4D. There are many folks who posted here that were caught with a new drone that they were unable to use as planned for a critical project!
The above is all great advice from my experience. I’ve come to all the same conclusions. I’ve just gotten to the point that I fly first in DJIgo4 app and manipulate all the camera settings (including focus), then fly th mission in [the other app, until now]. You don’t want to capture in auto anyway because it will adjust white balance if you fly over a darker area.
I read a post on another forum that said the new mavic had a rolling shutter. Not so great for mapping if that’s the case. I’ve not had time to confirm this news for myself.
Didn’t Pix4D Capture have the stop and shoot option before? Am I missing something? I like the idea of a waypoint position rather than timed shots for certain purposes…mainly for mission repeat.
Hoping to get some good flying weather this weekend to check out the new app version with the P4PV2. I’ll update here if so.
Cheers
Richard - the stop and shoot option seems missing (had it when I was flying Mavic Air with rolling shutter where this is a bigger concern). The stop and shot really increased flight time dramatically (a battery challenge). I have found that if you slow the flight speed somewhat but still keep moving you can get the motion blur to be well less than the ground sampling distance (camera sensor resolution limit) so motion blur is not an issue. Relates to the camera settings. If for example you are 1/250 of second and flying at 6 ft per second, the motion blur is 6 * 1/250 = 0.024 feet or about 0.28 inches. For a P4Pv2 this is about GSD for a 40’ flight so about in balance. Fly a little slower or a little higher or use a faster shutter and you are good without the stop and shoot option.
Key point - in most lighting situations with a little careful planning you can get sufficient;y sharp images for mapping without “stop and shoot”.
Tanks All for the tips & tricks, I am a construction Surveyor not a photographer that’s why I shoot in automatic mode. I will do some test with the settings mentioned above.
@ Mark Muntean
I have gotten much better with the camera. It’s reassuring to see that others have come to the same conclusions.
Just to confirm, the older version of Capture DID have the stop and shoot option…right? I can’t remember because I never actually got to use the app due to the fact that I bought a P4PV2. I liked this option for the purpose of mission replication / sensor location replication, not necessarily for photographic quality. The idea being that I could run better change detection data models in GIS on the individual photos (pre-orthophoto creation). It’s my experience that the post-processing in programs such as Pix4D (I’ve not actually run any photos through Pix4D yet, but I’ve used their competition) introduces too much variation in the orthophotos for my purposes.
@ Richard Rogers
The PIX4D Capture configuration setting for stopping for each shot is called “picture trigger mode”:
| Picture trigger mode
|
The Safe mode and Fast mode differ as follows:
- Safe mode : The drone stops to take every picture which significantly increases the flight time. However, the waypoints where to trigger the shutter of the camera are defined and uploaded to the drone before starting the mission. This means the drone can fly the mission without requiring a connection with the app.
- Fast mode : The app has to send a signal message when the shutter should be triggered. This mode does not require to stop in order to take a picture but the connection with the drone should be maintained without interruption. In addition, the Fast mode does not allow to change the orientation of the camera while flying this is why all images have the same orientation since the drone translates.
While “safe mode” assures no motion blur I have found that you can get really good results in Fast Mode if you have a fast enough shutter speed (~1/250-1/1000) and then select a moderate flight speed. My photo’s sharpness seems to be limited only by resolution of the camera which in conjunction with altitude determines the Ground Sampling Distance (GSD). GSD is controlled by the design of the camera, and the choice of the flight altitude and is displayed in PIX4D Capture. As long as shutter speed * flight speed = distance traveled while shutter open << GSD then motion blur will not be a limiting factor.
While safe trigger mode does download fixed waypoints for each shot, remember that the GPS accuracy of the drone is only good to a few feet anyway. I think there is also a limit on the maximum number of waypoints (it was 100 on my Mavic Air), but I am not sure if this is still a limit on the P4Pv2 since I have not used this mode lately. The real accuracy of the resultant map comes from the matching by the post processing software based on good overlap and interesting details which can result in a map with relative measurements accurate down to close to GSD. The actual exif position data is not that accurate and PIX4D Mapper actually computes required corrections of the camera positions for each shot. I also add Propeller Aeropoints for Ground Control Position (GPCs - precisely measured to <2cm actual points on the ground) and Check Points (additional measured point that are not computed into the map but can be used to later text the resultant map accuracy). My recent map could be “verified” by control points to be accurate to about 1 to 2 cm in all three dimensions.
Attached is a screen shot from a recent 3 acre map taken at 50’. The pink patch is 2" wide pink duct tape. and the black dot on it is a marking pen dot about the size of a dime. I used a few tape spots like this to also later check my map for accuracy in measuring dimensions and again found accuracy around 1 cm. The square object is one of the Aeropoint GPCs.
In summary, from my experience with the P4Pv2 using manually configured (fixed) shutter settings I can obtain excellent results with the “FAST MODE” where the drone continues to move while shooting. The only place I think the SAFE MODE would be needed is in very dim lighting.
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@ Sofie
I worked as a photographer for awhile so the camera aspects are familiar to me. Here is a step by step process I use for setting up the drone camera for mapping.
First, do make sure you DO NOT have a neutral density filter on the camera, these are useful for cinematic video but are not helpful for stills.
Next, using DJI Go 4 - fly the drone over the mapping area at the expected mapping altitude and find a representative setting. Point the gimbal the angle you will use for flight (90 degree for nadir, perhaps 70 or 80 for 2 way grid) (This is also a good time to fly around the site and confirm obstacle heights directly).
Manually focus on a subject on the ground. Make sure the camera is locked into manual focus mode. Look at what it reports as focus distance to make sure this appears consistent with the drone altitude. You can use the focus assist to zoom in and visually confirm accurate focus. Make sure the camera is left in manual focus mode so that it will not change this focus setting. A side benefit of using a fixed focus setting is that it prevents changes to the lens optics due to refocusing and this helps improve the accuracy of the mapped model later as the lens characteristics will not be changing from shot to shot.
Next go into manual mode settings for the exposure control, this allows you to set and fix the three settings that together control exposure - they are shutter speed (S), aperture (aka f/stop) (A), and Camera Film Speed or ISO.
I set the shutter speed first. As a rule of thumb 1/250 to 1/1000 seems to work, but you can verify what is needed by the check of flight speed * shutter speed << GSD. PIX4D Capture shows GSD and speed (when flying) based on your flight plan settings. If it is a bright day then there should be no problem with using a higher shutter speed.
Next I set the aperture. With the P4Pv2 you can select between f/2.8 and f/11. F/2.8 lets in the most light, but also has the shallowest depth of field (range of distances that will appear in focus). If flying over terrain of varied height, or over buildings (again varied height) it is helpful to try a higher value f stop like f/8 or f/11 - light permitting. f/4 or f/5.6 is usually pretty good. I would only use f/2.8 is lighting is really dim and you just need it to get shots.
This leaves one other setting - ISO. For the best quality image ISO 100 is preferred, but ISO 200 and 400 also will give very good images. Set the ISO by looking at the exposure and trying to get it right. Optionally open the histogram and look for an exposure setting where the histogram is not compressed at either the left or right side.
You now have selected fixed values for shutter speed (to assure no motion blur), for aperture (to assure sufficient depth of field and to keep the camera lens optics fixed) and ISO - as low as can be used to maximize image quality (i.e. reduce digital noise).
There is one last setting - color mode. If you select D-Cinelike the images will be a little lower contrast. This can help increase details in shadows of stark lighting (i.e. bright sunlight) which may help the post processing find more tie points later in the shadows.
This all sounds like a lot, but with a little practice you will be able to set this up in a minute or so. I always do a site pre-mapping manual flight anyway so I can confirm obstacles, make sure there are no people, etc. so it really does not add to the overall day.
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