Best Night Time Video Settings?

[Quag]

I have a project coming up where I will be shooting video of vehicles off roading at night. I want to expose the video so you can see the outline of the vehicle (maybe more detail, if possible), and the HID/LED lights mounted on the vehicles. One of the goals it to show how far the LED lights illuminate the road ahead.

I did some test shots last night and tried various settings... both auto exposure and manual override of the shutter speed and ISO. The quality of the test shots were ok, but there was a lot of noise with the ISO cranked to 3200. If I reduced the ISO to 1600 or 800, it was a lot better, but exposure became a challenge, the image was a bit dark.

I also ran into an issue where the EV value was stuck at -2.0. At first, I assumed this was just an indication of the current exposure value, given the shutter speed and ISO. But at one point, I was able to adjust all three values in manual mode: ISO, Shutter Speed and EV. Check out the attached screenshots, you can see the "EV" text is blue in one screenshot, I was able to change EV from -2.0 to 0 without changing ISO or shutter speed. But I was only able to do that once. Now, I can only edit Shutter & ISO, and the EV setting only acts as a live exposure meter based on the other two values.

Does anybody know if all 3 values are editable at the same time, or if this was just a weird bug? And any suggestions for how to set this up properly for night shots?

One last question: when you tap on the screen in the DJI Pilot App, you get a yellow square outlining your selection point. Is that for spot focus, EV or both?

 

[Kilrah]

The only thing the camera has to adjust exposure are shutter speed and ISO, so as you found out they are the only things you can use. So shutter speed as slow as possible, unless you suddenly have something very bright that becomes overexposed at ISO100, and ISO as appropriate.

The EV indeed becomes an indication when in manual mode, would be conflicting otherwise.

Yellow square is for spot metering. Focus is fixed...

 

[Quag]

Thanks Kilrah. I'm not sure what was happening when I was able to edit EV, but as you can see in the screenshot, it was editable in manual mode. It was similar to using a DLSR, where you can overexpose a photo using EV settings, while keeping shutter speed, ISO and aperture constant.

Anybody else have experience with Inspire cinematography at night?

 

[Kilrah]

It was similar to using a DLSR, where you can overexpose a photo using EV settings, while keeping shutter speed, ISO and aperture constant.

That precisely isn't possible...if you lock all 3 there's no more way to adjust exposure and the Ev scale also becomes a meter.

 

[InspiredOne]

Too many variables, in your proposed scenario. The lighting, or lack thereof, is going to be all over the place. Since you're new to this, I would highly recommend auto setting. At least test it and see how it works for you.

 

[Quag]

Been playing with it in a few different scenarios and settings. Auto mode works, but is often too grainy for the scenes I'm working with. I tried ISO 800 and 1600, with the lowest shutter speed settings (40/30). From my experience, 800 was the best if enough light was available to expose the image. This seemed to produce much better results than auto, but still lots of variables to focus on. I also switched into LOG mode and that seems to help a bit with noise reduction.