Mavic Air How To Make Night hyperlapse

[Señior]

hello
can anyone say best camera settings and modes for mavic air on night hyperlapse

 

[Harold Morgan]

If you leave it on auto, there's no telling where the Air will set your ISO. Try auto, then relaunch in manual and pay attention to your histogram, leaving the ISO as low as you can. Too many variables as it totally depends on your shot.

 

[slup]

Assuming that you intend to make your hyper lapse by taking stills ...
Of course it depends on which quality expectations you have in the end ... but just to snap a still picture during night with perhaps only street lights lightening up the scene a bit below will require like 1,5-2 sec shutter & perhaps iso1600. Even here you probably need to take a bunch of pics to get one acceptable sharp. 1,5-2 sec. is really the max shutter speed for an airborne drone ... longer times & you can't get the pics sharp.

If you to this also add a moving drone I say you will be very disappointed. Perhaps you can get away with a time lapse (just a hoovering drone) but in the end you will for sure be forced to throw away half of the pics due to blurriness

... with simple math: take away time for drone positioning & return/landing then perhaps 10 minutes can be for the photo shoot, that's 600 sec. With both raw & jpeg I should say that the shortest interval shooting you can use is one every 5:th sec. due to the needed longer shutter. That give you 120 pics, of which half is blurry ... remaining 60. And with a frame rate of 24 fps for the time lapse you end up with a clip of approx. 2,5 sec.

My best recommendation is to actually film the flight & speed up in post for the "hyper lapse look" even though also those exposure values will be tricky with very high iso values together with a slow shutter creating motion blurriness.

Regarding modes ...

For a hyper laps use Tapfly & set the speed as slow as you can ... even the slowest of 1,5 (or was it 2km/h?) looks a bit fast in the final hyper lapse. Use interval shooting with as high frequency as you can (jpeg 2 sec, raw 5 sec.), the more pictures you can get out of a battery the better it is both for the final clip length & for the perceived flight speed.

Here one of my first hyper lapse test from jpeg:

And here one time lapse from raw:

Good luck!

 

[Deleted member 109934]

hello
can anyone say best camera settings and modes for mavic air on night hyperlapse

I was playing with Mavic mini today, but MM can only take photos every 2s, 1s would be much smoother.
Fly as slow as possible when taking stills. here is my first attempt, I need to slow down a lot.

 

[slup]

I was playing with Mavic mini today, but MM can only take photos every 2s, 1s would be much smoother.
Fly as slow as possible when taking stills. here is my first attempt, I need to slow down a lot.

Yeah ... 2s is the fastest interval that you can shoot in jpeg & 5s in raw. This so the camera have time to do the internal saving/processing before the next photo is taken.

You can test an app called "Auto Clicker" if you are on Android ... basically an overlay over, in this case, the shutter button in Go 4 saying push each second for instance. Have tried it & it works but some times the saving/processing procedure can't keep up and no photo is recorded which shows up in the final hyperlapse as an abrupt ugly speed change. This problem is more pronounced when you try to take raw's faster then each 5s.

Also avoid to fly the drone manually as constant speed is crucial to get a smooth end result ... automate the flight with for instance Tapfly Free in the slowest speed possible, set the heading & perhaps yaw abit to the side and release the drone & start the interval shooting. Keep the drone fly as long as possible, just leaving enough battery to return safely.

 

[Deleted member 109934]

I would love to try tapfly, but Mavic Mini does have all the cool options, it is literally manual or nothing, good it has 2s interval shooting. You can set the speed, nothing, fully manual slow flight. I guess I need to practice a lot

 

[Deleted member 94047]

TapFly is good; but Litchi is even better. You can set up a hyper-lapse waypoint mission with the AC moving at a speed of your liking (I find that 1.1km/hr works well). And now, they have integrated interval photos in to their waypoint actions menu, so that makes it even less of a hassle. Plan the mission well in Mission hub and you can even merge footage from two or three flights in to one seamless hyper lapse.

Here is a three stage (three flights) waypoints mission I used recently to capture images for a sunset hyper-lapse sequence; with each subsequent flight starting the interval photo sequence from where the previous one stopped.
Flight 1 - Mission Hub - Litchi
Flight 2 - Mission Hub - Litchi
Flight 3 - Mission Hub - Litchi

 

[Harold Morgan]

As an editing possibility, both Davinci Resolve and Premier Pro have Optical Flow time remapping, which creates "calculated" frames between two existing frames. This enables smooth slow motion that would otherwise be jerky. I plan to experiment with this soon. Also, Litchi now allows you to start a mission from other than the first waypoint, so you could send the bird up multiple times to get a really long continuous looking shot.