I’ve been involved with and participated in the Earhart Project since August of 2001.At some point – I want to say somewhere around 2008 I became the keeper of the video media – all of it – that the project has generated since 1989. The project has media that spans the gamut from consumer 8mm video shot on the first couple of expeditions to digital 8 which is a precursor of sorts to the DV format popular in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, to Betacam SP, DV tape, 720 HD,  and 1080 HD  which came into play 2010 going forward to the present. There has been some limited use of 4K HD lately but the data load of 4K isn’t very compatible for general expedition use given the parameters of the expedition work day.

With all the tape based material from 1989 thru 2001 there are 2 problems: 1) the recording medium is magnetic tape and both the physical tape and the magnetic recordings on the tapes are degrading over time. The oxide coating of the tapes loses its magnetism over time degrading the actual recording. 2) the mechanisms used to play back the recordings are no longer made, parts aren’t available, the people who know how to service the machines aren’t around any more, and many of the surviving tape machines are in poor condition, wearing out or functioning poorly.

To keep the earlier part of the project viable we’ve had to locate working machines and archive those along with the tapes. All the tapes have been digitized at this point and are archived both on hard drives and LTO tape, which is the best option cost results wise. If something happens to the digital archives, a trip back to the analog tapes would be necessary and there is no guarantee some of those old tapes will play back. The engineers who designed consumer 8mm tape back in the 1980’s probably didn’t take 30 year or more life span of the media into their calculus of design.

All tapes suffer from loss of magnetism, thought the Betacam SP format was designed with more robust recording protocols than the consumer tapes. That said, eventually all tapes will succumb to loss of magnetism, lack of functioning playback machinery or the recording oxide medium separating from the tape ( shedding) or possibly all three.

In 2007 the video documentation of the Earhart project moved into file based cameras, which meant that at the end of shooting day on the expedition, some hours were spent offloading or copying the original files from camera cards to two hard drives so there was a back up created at that time. Hard drives are not  archival. There will come a day when you plug in a drive to a computer and it does not mount, or doesn’t even spin. The original hard drive from the 2007 expedition, now 11 years old, has failed. All the files were backed up to LTO tape and a second hard drive prior to failure of the original drive. Life goes on.

Since 2010 the data load for Earhart Project video documentation has been going up as the video formats are moving towards higher quality. Fortunately hard drives, which are the buckets that temporarily hold the data have been getting bigger and cheaper, sort of tracking along with the increasing camera file sizes. To given an idea of this, in 2007 the whole video archive from the expedition that year was 700 GB. In 2015 the year of the most recent expedition, the data volume for the expedition had grown to 2.5 terabytes.

The big problem for this archive and every other archive of electronic media going forward is how to avoid going down the memory hole. Tape media can be  lost because original tapes having lost their magnetism won’t play back, working playback decks age out and break down either mechanically or electronically.

Undated Photo of my mom and two older sisters taken in 1945? Still viewable in spite of the marks left by tape, even after sitting in my parent’s unheated attic for 50~years.

Digital files can succumb to drive failure, file corruption or physical events like floods or fire that destroy archive media. LTO tape is a bright spot with a claimed 30 year life and a decent format roadmap into the future.

My prediction is that much of the media that has been created in the last 50 years is likely to disappear. The family vacation video tapes will be dust, unplayable, and the DVD’s that the videos were transferred to at some point won’t play either. The Seinfeld show, Cheers etc, will survive because its in the owners financial interest for those media files to survive, our  own photographic memories are likely to fail in one way or another, without fanfare, warning or advance notice unless we do the work to ensure they survive. The shoebox in the attic is no longer good enough.

The default way of thinking about flying drones is one of freedom. Its exciting to get an aircraft  up in the air and via proxy have the freedom to zip around in all dimensions unbound for a few minutes by the pull of gravity. Flight is great, the feeling of flying a UAV with a camera is so liberating that its almost a drug.

Its easy however to get a little carried away with the freedom of flight sensation and go straight to an Icarus situation where we fly a little too close to the sun, our wings come undone and we tumble back to Earth in an ungraceful and often risky fashion. The sun in this metaphor could be flying out sight and losing orientation, flying in a congested area- try under a jungle canopy some time- or coming to the realization that our own binocular vision/depth perception only works at relatively close range and once the aircraft gets to be a certain not so far distance away, we’re flying without true knowledge of how close we are to other objects in the environment. Flying a camera on a drone is initially exciting, but shortly thereafter the realization sets in about what can actually be accomplished photographically while flying both the aircraft and the camera at the same time. The reality is that IF one is obeying the FAA rules while flying a drone, maintaining eyes on the aircraft and not depending on the video feed as a proxy for “eyes on the aircraft”, then far less is possible. Things like range of operation where you can have unaided eyes on the aircraft become quickly much smaller than what on-line drone videos would have you think.

Which leads me to the idea of actually doing useful photography with a UAV which is what initially drew me to using UAV’s in the first place. Once the initial excitement  of flying a camera wears off, the need to confront doing some useful photography sets in and then adjustments in how to fly  need to be be made.

So I started thinking  about UAV’s as if they were dolly track in the sky, obviously more flexible dolly track than that made by Matthews and requiring zero grips, wedges and levels, but never the less track of a sort. When you set up a dolly move there is a start and an end in mind, some framing compositions to make along the move, combined with timing of events in the frame. When using a UAV to photograph controlled events I’ve found that what DJI calls intelligent flight modes are very useful in aiding by constraining  the aircraft flight path so that less attention can spent on the minutiae of flying and more attention placed on making the photography.

Intelligent flight modes are Course Lock, Home Lock, Follow Me, Point of Interest and Waypoints.

Take for example Course Lock which is an aircraft course heading (course lock is the same a compass heading) determined by the pilot, which the aircraft will fly in either direction. While being locked into flying the heading the aircraft can climb or descend while flying the heading, rotate, or make a lateral move while flying the locked course. While the degrees of freedom are just a few they can be used to great effect especially while doing repeated takes of a shot or situation. The aircraft heading is locked in and the other variable like speed along the course, altitude, direction the aircraft is facing, are all variable by the pilot so there is fine control over timing of aircraft  moves within  events while being locked to a particular course heading.

Point of Interest is another useful intelligent flight mode. This mode allows the pilot to establish a GPS point around which the aircraft can orbit  in either direction, While flying, the pilot can elevate or descend, close or expand the radius of the orbit while flying the aircraft, making it the same as course lock except with a circular path.

Follow Me is sometimes useful. An example for this was  I needed to create a shot of a person on the back of a ferry, with the UAV following behind. Follow me is perfect for this situation, because it puts the aircraft on an imaginary tether of variable length to the controller. While while flying, the length of the the tether is variable as is the vector of the tether relative to the controller.

Intelligent flight modes can lift a  weight off the pilot when it comes to moment to moment flying of the aircraft and free up attention to devote to flying the shot which is especially key when flying single control mode without a second operator. An added plus is that the pilot can bail out of intelligent flight mode at any time just by switching out of ATTI mode on the controller and regain total control of the aircraft in a fraction of a second.

Since  exploring intelligent flight modes and the possibilities included within those flight envelopes, I’ve started the mental exercise of framing my thinking about executing any given shot within the options available within intelligent flight modes before free flying a shot. Used correctly, intelligent flight modes are a path to less stressful flying and achieving better photographic results simultaneously