What Video Mode?

[Lesmess]

I mainly use my Inspire 1 & 2 for photos, I'm a bit overwhelmed by the amount of video modes on the I2. I don't have the licence or SSD at the moment, I have the X5S with Olympus 12mm F2 lens. What video I do take I upload to my Vimeo site, what would be the best all round format for general use? I'm not a pro so exacting quality is not an issue. As you probably can tell I'm not a an expert by a long way, I use Premiere Elements 13 for editing and have an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch) with 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and 32GB memory. As I said photos is my thing, all I need is a general video setting that will give an inexperienced user half decent results with little or no fine tweaking.
Thanks for any suggestions.

Les

 

[jborden]

I have been going through this recently and on a steep learning curve, still on this curve... so I am sure people who are more knowledgeable than me will also be along to help.

But this is what I have learnt so far:

There are a few basics to get right...

For now stick to H264 as H265 doesn't appear to be (well) natively supported and thus requires transcoding first.

Pick either 4K or 1080p, but remember that with 4K even if you don't want 4K video you can use this to crop/zoom in which is really useful.

Next is to decide on your shutter speed. If you are looking for a cinematic feel try 24FPS, but personally I find this too choppy when anything more than tiny movement is involved, so use 30FPS normally or 60FPS for sports (which gives buttery smooth shots and the added benefit of being able to slow down by 50% for slow mo shots).

Pick a suitable white balance, cloudy normally works quite well for me in the UK

You should really be shooting in manual mode which complicates things even more, but is worth it as the results will be better (in the end) and more importantly predictable. This avoids nasty exposure changes mid shoot.

In manual mode you are looking to have a shutter speed twice your frame rate. If shooting at 30FPS you want a shutter speed of 1/60 and if 60FPS you want 1/120.

The immediate problem when you first try this is that you will probably find it tricky to get hour shutter speed that slow. Even stopping down the lens to F11 (or more) might not slow it enough so you will have to invest in some ND filters (likely ND8 and ND16). One of these should slow things down suitably and allow you to open the aperture to a more preferred 5.6 or there abouts. You can tweak things slightly by playing with the ISO, but of course you want to keep this as low as possible to avoid noise.

I would start with these and see how you get on. It will take some experiment to know what settings are right for you and which ND filter to use when but the end result will be that you have complete consistent control.

Hope this helps.

 

[Lesmess]

I have been going through this recently and on a steep learning curve, still on this curve... so I am sure people who are more knowledgeable than me will also be along to help.

But this is what I have learnt so far:

There are a few basics to get right...

For now stick to H264 as H265 doesn't appear to be (well) natively supported and thus requires transcoding first.

Pick either 4K or 1080p, but remember that with 4K even if you don't want 4K video you can use this to crop/zoom in which is really useful.

Next is to decide on your shutter speed. If you are looking for a cinematic feel try 24FPS, but personally I find this too choppy when anything more than tiny movement is involved, so use 30FPS normally or 60FPS for sports (which gives buttery smooth shots and the added benefit of being able to slow down by 50% for slow mo shots).

Pick a suitable white balance, cloudy normally works quite well for me in the UK

You should really be shooting in manual mode which complicates things even more, but is worth it as the results will be better (in the end) and more importantly predictable. This avoids nasty exposure changes mid shoot.

In manual mode you are looking to have a shutter speed twice your frame rate. If shooting at 30FPS you want a shutter speed of 1/60 and if 60FPS you want 1/120.

The immediate problem when you first try this is that you will probably find it tricky to get hour shutter speed that slow. Even stopping down the lens to F11 (or more) might not slow it enough so you will have to invest in some ND filters (likely ND8 and ND16). One of these should slow things down suitably and allow you to open the aperture to a more preferred 5.6 or there abouts. You can tweak things slightly by playing with the ISO, but of course you want to keep this as low as possible to avoid noise.

I would start with these and see how you get on. It will take some experiment to know what settings are right for you and which ND filter to use when but the end result will be that you have complete consistent control.

Hope this helps.

WOW a lot to take in, great advice so thanks for taking the time to respond. I will play around with the various settings tonight. It took me three attempts at purchasing a UV filter before I found one that balanced my 12mm lens. I will have a look on the forum for recommendations for ND filters.


Sent from my iPhone using InspirePilots

 

[NickU]

If you just want to have some fun shooting and get used to video shooting at first and not have things dragging on the computer, then stick to 1920x1080 HD or one of the 2.7K options in H264. As you're on a Mac, probably better to also stick it in .mov instead of .mp4. Then when you take footage into premiere you don't have to wait ages for import or transcoding. Most stuff on YouTube and Vimeo is still played in 1080p (or lower).

As you get more used to it, then increase the resolutions you use. If you're going to film something special you think you might not catch again, then stick it in a 4K mode.

 

[NickU]

Oh, and a style - if you want something quick and easy for output and don't want to mess too much with colour grading/adjustment at the minute, then a style like D-Cinelike (think that's what it's called, DJI change the names between versions and drones!) will give you a reasonable colour mix without either over-flattening or over-pushing the colours, contrast etc.

Of course, once you get to the point you want to start getting the best results and tweaking stuff like you'd do with raw photos, then ignore the above

 

[Lesmess]

Oh, and a style - if you want something quick and easy for output and don't want to mess too much with colour grading/adjustment at the minute, then a style like D-Cinelike (think that's what it's called, DJI change the names between versions and drones!) will give you a reasonable colour mix without either over-flattening or over-pushing the colours, contrast etc.

Of course, once you get to the point you want to start getting the best results and tweaking stuff like you'd do with raw photos, then ignore the above

Thanks NickU
I set the following:
Ratio 16.9
FPS 50.00 Narrow Field of View
H264 1920x1080
Style Standard
Format Mov
Colour Truecolour
White Balance cloudy
Pal

I will give these a go at the weekend. How do I turn off the red in focus highlights? I can't find the switch anywhere, it was not on before I don't think.

Thanks for your advice.

Les