Is AWB-Worthless? Or Glitch?

[ScottM2Zoom1]

After 150 flight hours in 3 months I have gotten bored with just watching stuff go by and have studied and have been refining my photography skills for the last 30 hours of flight time....mainly stills. As I begin to dive in to videography I have noticed that AWB ruins many/most shots. Here's a 9 second example. Is AWB just crap.....or is my camera glitching? Thanks for your feedback...ok well....this site is not letting me upload 9 second .mp4 video file. I guess 1st how do I upload the video?

 

[brett8883]

After 150 flight hours in 3 months I have gotten bored with just watching stuff go by and have studied and have been refining my photography skills for the last 30 hours of flight time....mainly stills. As I begin to dive in to videography I have noticed that AWB ruins many/most shots. Here's a 9 second example. Is AWB just crap.....or is my camera glitching? Thanks for your feedback...ok well....this site is not letting me upload 9 second .mp4 video file. I guess 1st how do I upload the video?

There’s no clip in your post but AWB is good for sunny days I find but not good for most other lighting situations. Working with RAW however means you can change while balance in post so it doesn’t matter quite so much. Video is different however

 

[DebianDog]

if you work with RAW AWB does not matter. Personally I leave it on sunny all the time as I do not want the camera switching if I am in video mode. It makes fixing it in post a PITA.

Upload to youtube or use a shared drive like dropbox or Sync

 

[ScottM2Zoom1]

There’s no clip in your post but AWB is good for sunny days I find but not good for most other lighting situations. Working with RAW however means you can change while balance in post so it doesn’t matter quite so much. Video is different however

I tried to post file 2x....keeps saying wrong file extension ....not allowed. The file is a 9 second .mp4?

 

[ScottM2Zoom1]

if you work with RAW AWB does not matter. Personally I leave it on sunny all the time as I do not want the camera switching if I am in video mode. It makes fixing it in post a PITA

The mp4 file I tried to upload (keeps saying extension not allowed) is a 10° pan of same scene and AWB goes from 4600 to about 5200. That's a no-go....is that normal?(there is no change in lighting. It's of the ground with no horizon introduced)

 

[DebianDog]

I do not think this site allows video uploads directly to it. 9 seconds could be up to 150 megs in H.265 in 4K. that's a lot

it is perfectly normal for AWB. If you really want to shoot "pro" you manual everything and lock your shutter speed then adjust the lighting with ND filters.

 

[brett8883]

The mp4 file I tried to upload (keeps saying extension not allowed) is a 10° pan of same scene and AWB goes from 4600 to about 5200. That's a no-go....is that normal?(there is no change in lighting. It's of the ground with no horizon introduced)

You need to upload s video to YouTube or so either streaming service and then post the link to it here. This is a complaint I have as well that the awb changes during a shot especially in the evening or early morning and the primary reason that there are presets like sunny and cloudy. At least the white balance won’t change during a recording.

I do find myself setting a custom white balance for video most of the time. Yes you are right when it comes to video the AWB is worthless.

 

[DebianDog]

This guy is verbose but I think my footage looks better with his tips

 

[JAW]

Oh.......I thought this might somehow tie-in the Assault Weapons Ban with drones.?

Ed Ricker, a very knowledgeable YouTuber with over 100K subscribers, recommends using a preset rather than the auto setting when it comes to white balance. I found that advice to accurate.

 

[Aerial-Pixel]

After 150 flight hours in 3 months I have gotten bored with just watching stuff go by and have studied and have been refining my photography skills for the last 30 hours of flight time....mainly stills. As I begin to dive in to videography I have noticed that AWB ruins many/most shots. Here's a 9 second example. Is AWB just crap.....or is my camera glitching? Thanks for your feedback...ok well....this site is not letting me upload 9 second .mp4 video file. I guess 1st how do I upload the video?

I typically keep my white balance at custom of 4500k to 5000k. As mentioned above this keeps it from changing when you pan or your lighting situation changes.

 

[Smokieflies]

AWB is measuring light that the camera is looking at. Green trees will reflect lots of light, blue sky a different color. Clouds yet a third. I would recommend AWB on clouds to get reading and manual set it to that setting.

 

[ZX14-R]

I personally have camera settings in MANUAL and use AEB mode on 3 or 5 pics with RAW setting on. I then use a program called easyHDR to bring in the 3 or 5 photos in and create a HDR Picture.

You could possibly get away without using the RAW setting as easyHDR does not have a camera setting for the Mavic so manual adjustment for Lens has to be set.

Depends on how much time and effort you want to put into your photos.

 

[Hegemone]

I shoot I a similar way as the above posts. I don't worry too much about white balance and set it in Lightroom after the fact from the raw file using the eydropper on something I know is white. Easier then flying to a white posterboard I am holding up and taking a picture to get a white sample that will change once I move to a new subject. With how easy things are now a days white balance is of little worry to me. Not like when we were all shooting film.

Light room also does hdr super simple. Control click all the bracket images and then stack to hdr from the menu bar. It even helps thin out the catalog since it puts them in a pretty stack hiding the +/- images.