I’m newish to droning (DJI mini pro 5) and so far have focused only on practicing controlling the drone/camera. I’ve now been asked to produce some footage of a dog walker with dogs with the output going to a website.
What are best video settings on the drone? And what should the output setttings be for a website?
Any other tips welcome.
AI says: On the drone:
4K / 50 fps
1/100 shutter
ISO 100 where possible
D-Log M if you’re comfortable colour grading
Manual white balance
ND filter as necessary
Normal/standard sharpening rather than heavily sharpening the footage
Then in your edit:
Website master:
1920 × 1080
25 fps if you want a more cinematic/normal UK-web look
50 fps if you want particularly smooth movement
H.264 MP4
Rec.709
Around 8–12 Mbps for 1080p is a sensible starting point.
I did some similar, tracked workmen and machinery moving about for their website and used pretty much those settings, had good feedback - manual WB is fine if your not moving around much too. Just my experience but others may have more pro tips.
4k 50 or 60 fps is imo a better option much more smoothness, sharper detail and can crop zoom or reframe your shot later in editing without losing clarity, you will get more textures and clearer in the people and surrounding area, you can export as a much better clean1080p final cut benefiting cutting down the video size for a webpage.
Contrary to the below 24fps is what I use for any video where people are being filmed. 60fps has no motion blur at all and looks quite unnatural - but is OK for fast action … walking dogs is definitely not ‘fast action’ by any definition. For example, rivers and waterfall footage looks dreadful at 60fps…granular, sharp and ‘bitty’ vs smooth and natural
Just a reminder of the 180 degree shutter rule that cinema has proven to be the most pleasant. Whatever your frame rate is, double it and that is the shutter speed you are looking to get closes to. The result being a visually comfortable amount of motion blur and not that ridiculous clean detail that we got from The Hobbit and Avatar 2.
Not that I am by any means a dog-walker, and looking at the dialogue so far the drone and editing settings are covered for general video work anyway by the suggestions in the forum s
But.. what sort of duration, environment, and walked distance is the drone expected to cover in the livestream?
If the dog-walker is expected to just throw the drone into the air (with the above settings ), walk 4 miles, then recover the drone, I fear the stream will probably be quite short due to battery life, trees, other obstacles etc.
If the intention is for someone else to manage the streaming and control the drone, you should get a much better result, though repositioning the drone for best shot, changed environment, hazard avoidance etc may not make for a smooth contiguous? Livestream.
For me, starting to get overweight, any walk over a mile is severely gonna tax the battery life of the drone AND controller
