Gaui 330X Quadcopter and Video Distortion

This is quite a nice video taken from my Gaui 330X Quadcopter of a converted warehouse and a development area in York city centre known as Hungate.

As is often the case in York, being an historic town, the development has been put on hold for archaeologist to dig the site for artefacts, which you can see in this video - hopefully they are making some exciting finds.

Also in this video you can see an odd ripple effect. This is caused by the vibrations from the quadcopter motors and the rolling shutter of the CMOS censor in the Gopro camera. Moat video cameras have CMOS censors, so to avoid the ripple effect one has to reduce vibrations to a minimum or use a CCD censor camera instead. Unfortunately high quality, HD CCD cameras are very expensive, in fact it's because the CCD censors are expensive that most camcorder procures don't use them as it would make their product prohibitive to casual users.

Anyway, you can usually get excellent results with a good CMOS camera like the Gopro Hero HD so long as you cut down the vibrations. You can do this by balancing the props, making sure all the screws are tight on your machine and using some kind of dampening system between the machine and the camera mount - such as rubber rings or plates, or some kind of shock absorber system.

With this video I simply had my camera stuck to two layers of foam rubber on top of the quadcopter, which was inadequate because the rubber was too hard and didn't really absorb any vibrations, and because the camera was too high so all the vibrations were exaggerated with a kind of pivot effect.

A purpose-made camera mount situated underneath the quadcopter will lower the centre of gravity and make the quadcopter more stable, plus the movements/mechanics of the camera mount, couples with rubber dampers, will pretty much eliminate vibrations and produce a much better video. Some people take things a step further and spend time balancing their props, but I have not given that a try yet myself so cannot comment.