I’ve been playing around with night videos/hyperlapses.
This video was shot using Night Mode at 4K 60FPS on the Mini 4 Pro in standard (not HLG/D-LOG M), with some slight tweaking in Premiere Pro afterwards. ISO was set to 200. (Must confess I cannot remember the other settings, and I deleted the .SRT file now, before thinking of the bright idea of employing the ‘hive mind’ of Grey Arrows). I remember dropping the EV a couple of notches as well.
Any suggestions welcome.
P.S. In case anyone is wondering, this is the A10 in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, going southbound.
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I suppose it depends what effect you want to achieve. The footage you’ve posted looks pretty good to me, it’s what you would see with your eyes if you were aboard the drone looking in that direction, which suggests to me that the exposure is not far off.
The problem, to my mind at least, is the large areas of unexposed blacknesss away from the dual carriageway, and I can’t think of a way around it by tweaking settings that will not increase noise or overexpose the car headlights. I’d suggest filiming in twilight or bright moonlight to see if the situation is improved. My own recent attempt, shooting vertially downwards above the Gabalfa interchange in Cardiff, was an underexposed abject failure despite being in late dusk ambient lighting and from above the floodlights, so I can’t really advise you from actual successful experience.
I’m going to revisit this location at dusk and tweak settings a bit, so I’'ll report back, but my photographic instincts rebel at the idea of shooting in full night conditions with a black sky like the planet Krikkit in Hitchikers… a bit of dying light or pre-dawn glow lifts these sorts of image. But that assumes a horizon and some sky in the image, which is much less the case with ‘up there looking down’ drone filiming.
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Thanks for the detailed response. It’s nice to know that this is broadly the sort of quality that people would expect. (I didn’t think it was bad, but wanted to know a) what others thought, and b) if I could do better.) I agree with the large areas of black - in hindsight I could have positioned the drone over to the left more, as this would have had more street lighting to even things out.
I hope to do some more night filming in a few roads near me where the locals go mad for Christmas lights - should make for a nice top-down view! Will post here when done.
I was wondering whether an LPF (Light Pollution Filter) might assist with such shots?
I also took a AEB shot, which I then merged in Lightroom. However, given the slower shutter speed due to it being dark, the results were not great. When you view the five images one after the other, you can see there was significant car movement.
It’s not bad, but I still think it’s not great - there’s a lot of noise.
Anyone else played around with night videos/photos?
This is pretty good…worth watching!
