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Christmas Light Video Help

BikerGeek

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Joined
Feb 27, 2018
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Age
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I filmed my Christmas house using my Air 3s for the first time this year. I've used my Mavic Pro and my Air 2 and never had weird results such as this. When filming the lights on the roof it will look like large swaths of lights are out only to show up when flying over them. They're LED lights. It almost looks like the lights that aren't showing up are at a wrong angle? Yet when I take a photo, it looks fine. The first shot is a screen shot from the video. The second is a photo I took.

I just had it set for Auto. Any suggestions on settings? I know there are night settings but what about filming bright lights at night?
 

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The LED lights are lit by alternating current and the shutter speed of the video is too fast to allow for an individual video frame to show everything properly lit up. If you change the shutter speed of the photo to match the video shutter speed, it will look the same. However, the photo shutter speed is slow enough to allow all the LED's to light up during the exposure.

Cool Xmas display!
 
AC on the lights shouldn't matter.
If incandescent, they won't "strobe" because the element in the lights doesn't cool down fast enough between peaks to make a difference.
LEDs often have a driver, but not always. If they have a driver then it will have it's own PWM independent of the voltage supplied because the LEDs aren't running on house voltage. The voltage is dropped down to a maximum of 12v through the driver.
Not all drivers use PWM either. It depends on what LEDs are built into the string.
 
AC on the lights shouldn't matter.
If incandescent, they won't "strobe" because the element in the lights doesn't cool down fast enough between peaks to make a difference.
LEDs often have a driver, but not always. If they have a driver then it will have it's own PWM independent of the voltage supplied because the LEDs aren't running on house voltage. The voltage is dropped down to a maximum of 12v through the driver.
Not all drivers use PWM either. It depends on what LEDs are built into the string.
However, it is clearly a strobing issue where the video shutter speed is faster than the still frame shot. How do you explain the OP's results?
 

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