Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Video capture. A Bad Good Idea?

A new gadget category is born this year at NAB2012: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles used for photo and video capture. Will it stand the test of time?

Picture from coverage by Adam Wilt at PROVIDEO COALITION:

Obvious questions that immediately come to mind:

• What is the life expectancy of an UAV? Unless it’s controlled by a trained RC guy, my guess is that it will crash within minutes of use.
• Insurance costs, anybody? Beyond destruction of valuable hardware, there is also a risk in injury for persons. Will even you get coverage?

More problems

• Vibrations can make photo and video capture unusable. Your UAV needs proper dampening and resonance cancellation features. I fear that cheaper UAVs don’t have such niceties. DYI solutions are not for amateurs, unless you have a structural engineering grade.
• In addition to controlling your UAV, you will need to remotely control your camera (zoom, aperture, …), so you probably need two people to operate it.

Aero Quartet Advice

Since our business is to repair corrupt video footage, we are seeing an increasing number of cases coming from UAVs users. Here is our advice about how to minimize risks and costs:

• Use cheap cameras. Image quality will likely be limited by vibrations and by your RC skills, rather than by camera. Crashes will be less painful.
• Use strong tape to prevent camera doors from opening. Battery, SD card can be ejected under a violent acceleration and jeopardize the take.
• We can always recover corrupt footage due to a “hard landing”, but the last few seconds cannot be repaired because they have not yet been written to the persistent memory card.

We have also covered “Destructive or High-Risk Video Capture” in a previous blog post.

Conclusion

I have no doubt that UAVs will become very common in the next few years, not just for video capture, but for many other activities. Today, this is still an emerging technology that is difficult to master, that presents some risks, and doesn’t have a legal framework. It’s not ready for prime-time, but as it opens amazing new possibilities, I’m convinced within a few years it will become a standard practice, just like use of camera cranes or steadycam today.

Corrupt videos from new Canon 5D Mk III

We have received our first damaged video files from Canon 5D mark III users.

The good news is that we have managed to repair them with the same level of quality as damaged videos from the rest of Canon EOS family.

At bitstream level, there are a few differences: H264 video is now also using bidirectional frames (B frames), whereas Canon 5D Mk II and Canon 7D videos were only using keyframes and progressive frames (type I and P).

Audio encoding is the same, except for a 96 bytes padding found between audio and video. We haven´t found any convincing reason for the presence of the padding, but maybe Canon will use it in future models or firmware releases for advanced features.

The new API economy

A side effect of every world economic crisis is to invent new forms of economy and wealth creation. When everything looks grim, green buds will inevitably appear at the fringes of the system.

Jobs, as we have known them since the industrial revolution, are now under several threats: Low wage countries, of course, with the lever of global trade and technology.

But global trade and technology is indeed what will create huge opportunities in the next years, even in industrialized countries:
Imagine a small company that want to expand internationally. Today you have two options: create subsidaries, or close deals with local companies to distribute your products or services. None of them is adapted to modern economy that requires high speed and efficiency.

Here comes the API economy: What if we expose our business also through APIs? This will allow people all over the world to efficiently provide our services to their customers. For example, a person in Israel could provide our repair service in Hebrew, and a new business is born:
- we sell our service to people that we would never reach (albeit with a smaller margin)
- our affiliate in Israel builds a local customer base, and make extra money
- we keep things simple, in the end an “affiliate user” just needs to accept our terms of service and we provide him with tools

And what makes this kind of wealth creation possible is an API at the intersection of a company’s know how and an affiliate’s market reach.

In API economy takes off, we will see less traditional jobs and more people engaged in one or several API businesses. Implications on society and economy can be huge.

Walking around Blind

For me, one of the most difficult aspects of running a business is that you will never have good information to take decisions. You will walk around blind most of the time.

Of course, I keep track of many metrics, the obvious ones (new customers per day, monthly revenue) and the domain-specific ones (like diagnostic accuracy or repair success rates split by camera models).

But you only can track what users do, and the most important information is about what people doesn’t do and why, from people that will not even become users, or from users that give up because your product sucks. But at the end, there is no easy way for you to know why your product doesn’t get noticed or sucks.

Therefore, the information that you collect tends to be heavily biased towards confirming what you already know, rather than telling you what you ignore or what needs to be fixed.

One example: Localization
Our Repair Service is currently only available in English. In Aero Quartet we have also native French and Spanish people, so we would like to make the service available in those languages, and also in German (we’ll need to hire for that). Now I need to make numbers and figure out how much growth I can expect from localization in FR, ES and DE.

I know that exactly 7.4% of my customers are in french-speaking countries or regions. Easy.
But the really interesting figure is how many would-be customers are turned away because the service is not in French. And that figure is not something I can measure, because people searching for “réparer fichier XDCAM” will never find us or contact us in the first place.

Therefore, to take the right decisions, I will try to look at it from different perspectives, and take calculated risks, just like a blind person compensating with other senses.