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Drone Highlights of 2014

A lot has happened in my drone world this past year, though I really haven’t made much mention of it here. A quick recap of some of the highlights:

In February, I acquired a 3D Robotics IRIS, a fun ready-to-fly quadcopter with autonomous flight capabilities. I shot this fire aftermath video soon after.

Built my first quadcopter in April and participated in the Game of Drones – Aerial Action Sports League competitions at the Bay Area Maker Faire in May. Didn’t win any battles, but did hang out in the net a good bit.

First Drone Build: Von Drone California Special

Presented at dorkbotSF about my drone build and Game of Drones Maker Faire experience.
Shot a few dronies with friends using the 3D Robotics IRIS and a new DJI Phantom 2 Vision+.

Invited to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp where I hosted a session on drones with fellow drone pilot friend Chris Poole.
Participated in Science Hack Day San Francisco and contributed to the Personal Security Drone project.

Built a FPV 250 racing quadcopter. Needs a bit of tweaking and more air time, but she flies.

Second Drone Build: Turtle 250 FPV Racer Quad

Built a quadcopter based on the Game of Drones Hiro “indestructible” airframe.

My build of the Game of Drones Hiro "indestructible" airframe. — Third Drone Build: Game of Drones Hiro “indestructible” Airframe.

Shot a ton of aerial videos in exotic locales that are in the ever growing edit queue. Soon, really!

Media Coverage

I was recently interviewed for Intel’s iQ “online magazine” about the current state of consumer drones. Very humbled to be quoted alongside Chris Anderson, 3D Robotics founder and CEO.
Back in October, New York Magazine ran an exhaustive piece on drones, “Drones and Everything After.” There’s a bit in there from me about my Burning Man 2013 drone video and experience.
In September, I was a guest on Rotors Up: The Game of Drones podcast, the very first episode.

I can only imagine what 2015 has in store for our drone future.

Drones | Video

Why I’m Giving up on Creative Commons on YouTube

I’ve been a long-time supporter of Creative Commons content licensing, which facilitates the proliferation of art and culture through sharing. On Flickr, I license the majority of my photos CC BY-NC-SA. It’s a good implementation and I’m happy to support people using my stuff non-commercially as I have other artists’ works.

Not so on YouTube. I recently came across this opportunistic individual who took my drone video of Burning Man 2013 and reposted it in its entirety to YouTube under the inaccurate and misleading title “Drone’s Eye View of Burning Man 2014.” A few issues here.

1. It’s not a video from 2014. This guy just reposted my 2013 video using a very SEO friendly title, as apparently a lot of people are searching for Burning Man 2014 drone videos. Google is happy to send people his way.

2. He’s monetized my video, I have not. I explicitly chose not to monetize the video as I was abiding by Burning Man’s noncommercial ethos. At almost 100k views, this guy is surely profiting.

3. There’s not much I can do about it.

The reason I can’t do anything about is I originally licensed my video CC BY, YouTube’s only Creative Commons license option. CC BY means that a user can do whatever they want with it, just as long as they give proper attribution to the creator (more on that later). Commercial use is allowed, which YouTube makes very easy by letting the resulting video be monetized with ads. Combine that with an SEO friendly, yet inaccurate and misleading title, and PROFIT!

YT Licenses

I never expected that someone would repost the video in its entirety and monetize tons of views from it, or that YouTube would make this so easy.

The intention of CC licenses, as I’ve always believed, is to grease the wheels of culture. To create a repository of creative work that can be drawn upon to make new creative works. There are a handful of different Creative Commons license options that allow a creator to decide how they wish their works to be used. I generally go with CC BY-NC-SA which stands for “By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike.” By using this license I’m stating that you are welcome to use my works non-commercially in your own work as long as you properly attribute it to me and share the resulting work in the same manner. If you want to use my works commercially, you are welcome to contact me and see if I’m open to a deal. Otherwise, there is no need to get my permission as long as you adhere to these terms.

The real issue is YouTube’s remix tool is horribly broken. Of the 68 videos that users have “remixed” from my video, 36 are wholesale reposts of my entire video (many of which are monetized with ads). 28 are by accounts that have since been deleted by YouTube for various TOS violations and a whopping THREE are actual original new works in which a sample of my video appears.

YouTube Videos Using This Content

How YouTube fulfills CC’s attribution requirement is also broken. CC BY license stipulates, “If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.” To find this info on YouTube, you must go a video’s landing page and first click the “SHOW MORE” text in the description below the video. Here the Creative Commons Attribution license with link is clearly displayed. Below this, there’s a “View attributions” link which needs to be clicked to discover the original author’s credit and source video link. There’s no way the average YouTube user is going to go through these steps to learn what they are viewing was partially or wholly created by someone else.

Drone_s_eye_view_of_Burning_Man_2014_-_YouTube_1

2nd click

It’s really unfortunate that YouTube doesn’t offer different flavors of CC licenses like Flickr has been doing for years. Had BY NC been an option, monetization could be prevented. I guess it’s not in YouTube’s interest to offer video hosting for videos that can never be monetized.

As long as YouTube’s CC implementation is broken, I will not participate in it. I’ve rolled back the CC licenses on 35 of my videos to YouTube’s Standard license. Not ideal, but at least I have some recourse if someone now tries to profit from my videos.

It’s a real bummer as Creative Commons is a great resource for source material for making art and furthering remix culture. I really hope YouTube cares enough to get it right.

Live Streaming | NAB

New Livestream Hardware at NAB 2014

At this year’s annual NAB Show in Las Vegas, there was a lot to be excited about in the world of live Internet broadcasting.

Livestream at NAB

Livestream, the live Internet broadcast platform, had quite a large footprint this year to show off their new wares. Livestream is best known for their live streaming service, but increasingly is becoming a full professional end-to-end broadcast solution. This mean the introduction of a bundle of new beautifully designed video switching and encoding hardware this year.

Livestream has introduced new models of their Livestream Studio live production switcher. When Studio was introduced last year, the Studio HD500 was released as a portable PC-based plug-n-play switcher/encoder. This was followed by a software only version that anyone can run on their own off-the-shelf PC reference hardware with capture cards.

For 2014, Livestream has expanded their lineup with the HD51, HD510 and the HD1710 Studio models. All models are multi-channel HD live production switchers that squarely take aim at Newtek’s Tricaster. The HD51 and HD510 can take up to five HD-SDI or HDMI sources, with the HD510 including a touch-screen monitor built in to its portable form factor. The HD51, and more expansive HD1710, require external monitors. The HD1710 can take in up to a whopping 17 HD-SDI video sources that all can be displayed across four multi-view monitors and switched live. All models allow for multiple channel ISO recording in AVI MJPEG format. Not the best if your workflow is editing in Final Cut Pro 7, but plenty fine if you’re using Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro X. A Livestream rep told me Quicktime format support will be forthcoming.

Livestream Studio™ Tech Specs

The new awesome hardware doesn’t end there. Taking a cue from Apple’s industrial design department, Livestream has introduced a new hardware control surface simply called Surface. This control surface gives you an intuitive and customizable interface to all the controls of the Studio software interface. Every slider, knob and toggle of Surface is mapped directly to their software functions in Studio. Surface is actually composed of two modules, Core and Track. Core is the main switching control surface that works with up to 5 source channels. Track is the add-on module that gives you 15 more source channels to control, something you’ll want if you have a Studio HD1710.

Livestream Studio HD1710

Livestream Studio combined with Surface looks to be a formidable competitor to Newtek’s Tricaster line. Features such as multiple program outputs, graphic overlays and titles, downstream keying are all native to Studio. One thing I’d like to see better support for is expanded audio input connections. Livestream’s switchers have one or two 1/8″ mini jacks for audio, otherwise audio is expected to come in embedded over the HDMI and HD-SDI inputs. The specs on the HD500 and HD1710 do claim they can take up to four 1/4″ RTS analog audio inputs, though it looks like you’ll need to have a nest of breakout cable snakes to pull this off as these models use Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink Studio capture card for this. Tricaster does have the advantage here in that XLR and TRS analog audio input connections are natively hardware mounted across their line.

Livestream Surface

Another standout feature for Studio is the ability to mix in a variety of remote camera sources. Smartphones running the Livestream app, Teradek and Broadcaster wireless camera-top encoders and even Google Glass are all supported live sources.

As an encoder, Livestream Studio supports all major streaming platforms and RTMP destinations. YouTube and Ustream profiles are populated in the destinations menu. Though Livestream does include a year of their broadcast Platform service with their hardware, using it is by no means required. I’ve written about Livestream’s service offerings previously.

All told, Livestream is firmly carving out a beautifully designed, intuitive, end-to-end live broadcast ecosystem. We’ll be keeping our eyes on them as they grow.

Drones | Video