The Turbowing Cyclops 3 DVR

The Cyclops 3 is a very small FPV camera with built in 720p/30fps DVR; perfect for getting upload-ready footage from small drones where you can't attach an action cam.

It's not the best camera around, but it is light and cheap (I paid £13 for it from BangGood). The footage is decent, significantly better than the SQ8 I've also got, but it needs some colour tweakage for it to shine, and the stock lens has significant distortion on it. (There is a useful site here about it)

Thankfully ffmpeg has an incredible variety of effects and filters that can be applied, so can transform the footage (as well as transcoding it something other than the mjpeg that comes off the camera). I use the following:

• Colour curves (these are a flexible way to change the contrast, saturation, and colour balance)
• Lens correction (to get rid of the fish eye)
• De-shake (to compensate for my bad flying)
• Smoothing (to remove any noise from the video)
• Pop: To add noise back in/locally increase dynamic range.

I found it quite difficult to set colours curves manually, and was spending too long guessing colours, so wrote a simple(ish) perl script to take the pain out of things. It's not clever or brilliantly written (particularly it doesn't use the FFMPEG API, it simply asks ffmpeg to write screenshots of the current settings and loads them), but it's fast enough and helpful.

Download

If you want to download it, you can do here

It works on Windows and Linux, but you will have to do some minor editting to the .ini file to get it working :

• "FFMpegPath" : "ffmpeg/",
  • Needs to be changed to your FFmpeg path (download the latest versions from http://ffmpeg.org/)
• "VideoPath" : "/your/path/to/Videos/",
  • Needs to be changed to whatever your working folder is
• "ExePostFix" : "",
  • On windows, change this to ".exe"

I use http://strawberryperl.com/ on windows. On linux you may also need to install some modules (cpan install Tk Tk::JPEG JSON Storable)

You will also need to download to a recent version of ffmpeg (older ones won't have deshake)

In Use

Press Load Video and select your desired input video. Then select a point for the video to start and to end, and try some presets to see what gets you close to where you want to go.

The colours are tweaked using the curves at the top left. You can see the results as you change things. Press preview to see a video preview (without smoothing or lens correction).

Press export, then copy the resulting commands into a convenient batch file/shell script, and run at your leisure.

Results: