Circle Feature

[davpmars]

Please tell me if I am wrong but this is how I understand the circle feature.

You can raise high above an object and have the drone circle the object/person at a speed that you set.

My question is whether or not you have to be rather close to the object for the drone to keep that object focused and in the center of the shot? Can you be 100, 200, 500 feet away and it will still keep the object in the center or at that point, do you have to do it yourself with piloting skills?

 

[Northwood Mediaworks]

Page 16 of the Spark Manual covers all the modes... Sorry, I have not yet tried these myself, but I believe the focus is infinite, so the distance does not matter.

https://dl.djicdn.com/downloads/Spark/20171031/Spark User Manual V1.6.pdf

 

[Dronason]

Please tell me if I am wrong but this is how I understand the circle feature.

You can raise high above an object and have the drone circle the object/person at a speed that you set.

My question is whether or not you have to be rather close to the object for the drone to keep that object focused and in the center of the shot? Can you be 100, 200, 500 feet away and it will still keep the object in the center or at that point, do you have to do it yourself with piloting skills?

As said before by @Northwood Mediaworks, the focus will not be a problem.
With all these tracking modes, there are minimum requirements for the subject being tracked. In general it needs to be visible by the camera of the drone. That means it has to be of some size and a good contrast toward the background. There is no numbers that can be really given where are the limits, sometimes it stop in the middle because it lost the track. Best is to think in place of the firmware handling the video. It is able to recognize a person from a car but it has a lot of limitation.

In this video the guy is placed in perfect conditions for good tracking. Up to 100 feet should be no problem. 200 feet seems maximum and 500 feet probably more difficult, but it depend also on the size of the object tracked.

Don't forget to check there is no tree or obstacle in the path of the expected circle, especially if the object you track will move.

 

[GearHead83]

I've been practicing (and getting decent at) manually circling around me. I find the automatic circle feature looks down at too much of an angle for most of my uses

 

[lifeisfun]

If you go to tracking you can set it to circle clockwise or counterclockwise at certain speed for longer time as well, what I like to figure out if it's possible to determine just par of the radius and have it to go left right left right indefinitely.