Feels too jittery

[Digitaldias]

Hello everyone!

I'm the owner of a DJI Mavic Pro drone, and could use a couple of tips on how to get those buttery smooth pans. I feel that all of my pans are way too jittery compared with some of the footage I see from others. I experience the "studder pans" as well as random jitter sometimes.

I realize that this may be related to how I edit using DaVinci Resolve, where I downscale from 30fps to 24fps, so I've posted a question about that in the blackmagic forum.

If you know of anyhing in the settings that I could set that will give me smoother footage than what I'm currently observing, then you'll be making me happy!

I went outside this morning to do a quick shoot to show you how jittery the footage looks:

Drone was filming in 2.7k, 30fps, using -1 sharpness, -1 contrast, and 0 saturation.
The card I am saving to is a SanDisk Extreme 64GB XC1 (with the number 3 inside a U) - it should be fast enough, but I'm open for suggestions for anything that can be impacting my smoothness.

Any/All advice will be appreciated!

 

[msinger]

Check out the videos linked here.

 

[genesimmons]

u can change the camera setting on how fast and such that it pans, makes a huge difference, do a u tube search on it lots of info

 

[Mr. Salty]

My first bit of advice is that there’s no need to produce video at 24 fps unless it’s going to be used in a project meant for theatrical exhibition. Video at home is 30 fps or 25 fps, depending on the country.

That said, you’re always better off doing as little conversion as possible. Shoot in whatever frame rate you eventually want the final video to be.

 

[birdseyeinc]

I shot a bunch of video a couple of days ago at 24 fps and when I watched it back on my computer it was very jittery, to the point I couldn't use the footage.

I changed the setting to 30 fps, went back and reshot the footage and it was smooth this time around.

 

[Digitaldias]

So 30fps is the best then? Going to experiment with that too

 

[4wd]

It doesn't really matter which frame rate you choose for slow movements like that, but converting when editing can potentially cause problems.
It can be changed smoothly, in Premiere you can use 'interpret footage' and it changes the length of the clip too.

Something to bear in mind is that if you set 30fps your shutter can't go slower than 1/30th nd ISO will need to be increased which might be a problem.
In low light you can get close to that depending on the scene.
But in general a slower shutter speed will help achieve smooth video - that's why ND filters re often recommended.