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Video Tutorials

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rtrudeauphotography.zenfolio.com
Although I know a fair amount about photography after 40 years of being a professional photographer I am completely at a loss when it comes to doing videos with my Inspire1.

“Videography is totally and completely a different animal”

It is for this reason I would like to ask anyone that has a lot of experience at doing videos to make a You Tube tutorial if possible on the video settings on the Inspire and maybe explain a bit in depth of the whys and wherefores of the settings etc.

There is very little information on this subject on You Tube and it would be very helpful to those of us that are novices in doing videos. Our Inspire 1 is a great quad to fly and it would be great if we could use it to its fullest abilities.

I am sure most if not all would be very appreciative if someone could do this.
 
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Reactions: mdomeny
Whilst not a video I might be able to offer some guidance. As somebody who understands the way cameras work you're 90% of the way there. Whilst there are no rules as such, what most people aim for with video is to achieve a result that follows the standards of either film or broadcast video so as to achieve a viewing experience that is familiar for the viewer.

Whether these general guides apply to aerial videography I'm not sure, but hopefully this will help...

Framerate
Video is basically a series of stills, the framerate setting defines how many stills per second are recorded. The more frames per second the more lifelike the video will appear. We've become accustomed to watching TV at around 60 frames per second and film at around 24 frames per second so most people choose those settings to produce video that follows one of those defined principles.

24 frames a second is roughly the minimum framerate that a series of stills can be played back at without actually looking like a series of stills. The reason films were historically shot at 24 fps is because film and processing was expensive so they wanted to use as little as possible.

The choice to use 24 fps video with digital cameras is purely to mimic the look of historic film and achieve a result that when viewed has a cinematic feel. Whilst 60 frames a second produces a much more lifelike experience many people subconsciously equate that look to video and broadcast TV and not a cinema experience. So whilst 60 frames a second is technically better and contains more movement detail, the end result may not have that classic hollywood feel.

Shutter
Shutter effects both exposure and motion blur. When shooting stills the shutter is more often used to control exposure as blur is rarely required. The biggest difference in videography is that a certain amount of motion blur is required and needs to be maintained throughout. The shutter is generally not used to control exposure when shooting video, it's role is to set the level of motion blur. The most common shutter setting in film and video production is called a 180 degree shutter.

Historically when shooting on film the shutter was literally a disk rotating in the light path and part of the disk is removed to allow light through to the film. Most commonly half of the disk would be blocked and half would be open, hence the name '180 degree shutter angle', i.e., half of the 360 degree disk. This basically means that the shutter is set to expose each frame for half the framerate. So if shooting at 24 frames a second the target would be a shutter of 1/48th, or at 60 frames a second the shutter would be 1/120th. Both of these examples record the same amount of motion blur per second.

Just as a side note, you'll sometimes see people refer to "The 180 degree rule" assuming it relates to shutter angle, that's actually incorrect as the 180 degree rule is a reference to an entirely different principle relating to subject and camera positioning.

Exposure
Generally with photography and videography we have three main ways of controlling exposure in camera, Sensitivity (ISO), Aperture & shutter speed.

As with stills it's best to keep ISO as low as possible to maintain a clean image and with no aperture control in the Inspire's camera it resorts to controlling exposure using shutter speed. As discussed though this isn't ideal as shutter should be a constant in video, this is where exposure becomes a challenge.

When shooting in daylight with ISO at 100 the shutter speed required will often be much shorter than required for normal video production, so how we get the exposure correct without messing with the shutter speed? The answer is to use ND filters, these reduce the amount of light coming in through the lens to a point where correct exposure can be achieved without compromising shutter speed.

Resolution
The resolution setting controls the size of the video in pixels. Setting 4K, 1080, 720 etc simply defines the pixel size of the recorded images. The choice depends on a few factors based on delivery formats and requirements. The resolution does not effect the image quality other than the level of pixel detail captured. If in doubt more detail is better than not enough as while the footage can be downscaled without loss of detail, the same cannot be said for upscaling, in fact footage captured at 4K and downscaled to 1080 can look better than footage captured at 1080.

Color Profiles
When footage is captured by the sensor it is processed using a pre-defined color profile. The choice of color profile used really depends on what you plan to do with the footage and the desired look required. Generally it's best not to make decisions about color processing at capture time because any processing done can be irreversible. For instance a 'Vivid' setting will crush blacks and push highlights out of range to produce a more contrasty video, but all that color detail will be lost making it impossible to recover in post production.

It's generally better to shoot in a lower contrast color mode and then make color decisions during post production which can then be reversed if required. As well as being able to choose not to apply a color process by choosing 'None' the Inspire also includes a LOG color profile. LOG profiles record an image that looks flat and pale but what it's doing is recording as much color information as possible to allow you to pull back all that color information during post processing.

Color correcting LOG footage can be tricky, especially if you don't own or use higher end software so you need to make a decision about color profiles based on how the footage will be used and your own workflow.
 
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Reactions: m_flight and Glen
Although I know a fair amount about photography after 40 years of being a professional photographer I am completely at a loss when it comes to doing videos with my Inspire1.

“Videography is totally and completely a different animal”

It is for this reason I would like to ask anyone that has a lot of experience at doing videos to make a You Tube tutorial if possible on the video settings on the Inspire and maybe explain a bit in depth of the whys and wherefores of the settings etc.

There is very little information on this subject on You Tube and it would be very helpful to those of us that are novices in doing videos. Our Inspire 1 is a great quad to fly and it would be great if we could use it to its fullest abilities.

I am sure most if not all would be very appreciative if someone could do this.

If you would care to take a look under our 'Help' section there is a thread entirely dedicated to video tutorials!
You may find some useful stuff there.

See here. http://www.inspirepilots.com/threads/video-tutorials.2169/
 
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Reactions: Skold
Excellent reply Paul.
Richard the only thing you have to get your head around now is post production...good luck on that!
 

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