I am returning to Drones and have been learning to fly my Mavic 2 Zoom all over again. This mostly this consists of slow gentle circuits and precision manual landing and take off for now.
Today I started to pay more attention to the quality of the video I was taking and realized that, at one point I had inadvertently flown the drone towards the Sun, thereby overloading the sensor and darkening the video to almost complete black, this only resolved once I turned away and the sensor could pick things up again.
At the moment all my video settings are set to “auto”.
I will never be able to avoid this kind of situation and wondered if anyone had experience of the best way to handle the video settings to minimize this sort of contrast overload? I know that the rule of thumb is that you set ISO as low as possible and change the brightness of the shot by adjusting exposure - is that correct?
If I got this right you should be able to see the video I am talking about by following this link to YouTube.
Thanks for any help.
I think the camera has done exactly what it’s designed to do in that situation, and is probably what most people would want it to do - given the alternative! The alternative being that you manually set the exposure for the shot away from the direct view of the sun, then as you pan around to the sun the foreground stays more or less the same and the sky gets totally blown out (peak white).
As a newbie to this drone game I’m personally quite surprised that I prefer the drone’s decision to any of my possible own. In the professional world of television the camera’s exposure is constantly being tweaked for the best picture - take a look at some football coverage in bright sunlight with the shadow cast by the stadium halfway across the pitch for an idea of the problems the pros have with the highest end gear in this impossible situation. You couldn’t even being to emulate that given the control provided for manual exposure on your drone.
You could try some exposure tweaking in editing. DaVinci Resolve (which happens to be the highest end of video editors, but is actually free - shockingly) is known for its’ outstanding ability in this area (but Premier Pro and others can do this as well). However, because your video has already been processed by the drone for what could be called a final output, there is not a lot of room for manoeuvre unfortunately. High end video cameras can record the raw output of the sensor (putting it simply), which results in a very low contrast output that is then manipulated in post production. That could probably give you what you want! Or just don’t take shots like that…
Thanks for the response Martin_t
As it happens. DaVinci Resolve is my weapon of choice for video editing. I paid for the product when I came up against the limitations of the “free” version.
I am currently looking at a bunch of videos that talk about how best to handle video contract and optimum settings. Will see how I get on after that.
