I would like the option to run telephoto missions for my Mavic 3E.
I understand that the drone would need to potentially fly a lot slower and have a tighter spacing between photos, but the main reason for this feature would be safety.
I have been getting increased missions requiring higher resolution where the drone needs to fly below the treeline in order to capture the proper GSD requirements.
Basically I would like to sacrifice speed and fly the same mission at 100ft using the telephoto camera.
I have done testing with this as I have a project right now with 7 tower cranes and have to fly at 400ft which still only gets me about 30ft over the tallest crane. While it worked well with a waypoint flight and interval shutter there are some things to keep in mind. First would be the fact that the telephoto sensor is much smaller with an electronic shutter and only a 17deg FOV. Second thing is that it is only optical zoom up to 7x and beyond that is digital and artifact becomes very noticeable. It’s doubtful that level would ever bee needed but just beware of the line. I won’t even get into sensor size and resolution. These being known, yes you need to drop your speed considerably. While I am comfortable with 25-30mph in good conditions I had to run 15mph to be able to get the proper overlaps and keep the shutter interval at 1-2 seconds.
Hi Michael,
Are you using the Pilot 2 app, I have not yet tried this kinda way point mission to create a map grid.
My idea was more around just using the second camera as a 7x zoom as I do not trust digital zoom in the slightest for any value. I do not remember if the 7x camera on the m3e can even be set to raw, but on the m3(original) raw allows even more detail to be saved over the jpeg(and can be auto processed in lightroom or other program to jpeg).
I mainly just wanted to see what can be achieved at 120ft and what the equivalent standard sensor height would be to match the mapping detail and quality.
I keep getting requests for ultra HD maps of some small areas with 100ft+ tall trees and would like to just fly right above the treeline with the zoom instead of flying below the treeline and hoping I dont get snagged in some scraggle 
Drone would likely be flying about 4-12mph depending on how much patience I have.
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Yes, Pilot 2. You’re probably not going to get much above 10mph. If I have time tomorrow I’ll run another pattern and see how it actually processes. I would be interested to run the same flight from the same altitude with the main camera and zoom and see how it compares. Including field time. I’m just thinking that the serious drop in resolution, FOV and the electronic shutter there might not be as much of a meaningful improvement than it sounds.