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Sunrise Droning

Gkinghrn

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I've tried a few times now to film sunrise but I confess to be very underwhelmed by my attempts. Ive messes around with various settings but everything just looks dull and flat .... Was hoping to do a nice video with the Mini but as you can see its not great..


This is completely unedited footage btw so dont comment on the quality of my flying abilities :) - You also dont want to watch the whole thing!

Any thoughts on what I could have done better in terms of exposure etc?
 
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I've taken a LOT of sunrise photos with my DSLR for a project making a video showing one second of the sunrise for every day of the year. Truly beautiful.

The best results come from using a "vivid" color setting along with EV settings to underexpose by one, two or sometimes even more F-stops.

My Mavic Pro has has both vivid mode, and EV adjustments, which I've used for sunrise photos. See what you've got on the Mini. And if you have deeper color
control with HSV settings, experiment with those.

See the attached "Venus at Sunrise". If you zoom in to Venus in the middle of the imageyou can actually see that it is a circular disc, not a point source like a star would be.

VenusAtSunrise1200x630.jpg
 
And, if you have a digital camera of some sort, I'd suggest experimenting with that, taking dozens of images with all different settings until you've got it figured out. THEN go fly your drone with a good chance of getting it right the first time. Could save you hours of development. Good luck.

The above image was edited, cropped, color corrected, etc. with the impressive free FastSone image editor. FastStone Image Viewer, Screen Capture, Photo Resizer ...
Unless you have that kind of editing capability in video, I'd suggest you start out taking stills with the drone and editing them to see what's possible, then graduate to videos.
 
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I've tried a few times now to film sunrise but I confess to be very underwhelmed by my attempts. Ive messes around with various settings but everything just looks dull and flat .... Was hoping to do a nice video with the Mini but as you can see its not great..


This is completely unedited footage btw so dont comment on the quality of my flying abilities :) - You also dont want to watch the whole thing!

Any thoughts on what I could have done better in terms of exposure etc?

So you are asking me to watch this and not comment on your flying ability or your editing? What else are you asking for then? The film settings looked ok, but without further comments, of which I have some, there is a lot to be said. So here goes.

I did watch the whole thing. I liked the subject. Very nice place to film. The first part of the film shows the drone rising to a static place and parked there, filming the non-existent sun, but you picked a hazy day with clouds that obscured the horizon, thereby precluding any view of the sun. Then the drone yawed wildly 180 degrees down to the opposite view (west) , and again, static flying. At the end, you yawed quickly back and forth, dizzyingly, and re-settled on the original sunrise area to the east. Both yaws from east to west and from west to east should have been edited out.

So to "do better in terms of exposure" is not the question since the exposure was the best part of the video, considering there was no color grading which would have added some contrast to the haze and better colors. Oh, by the way, without a nice music track, you lose quite a lot.
 
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So you are asking me to watch this and not comment on your flying ability or your editing? What else are you asking for then? The film settings looked ok, but without further comments, of which I have some, there is a lot to be said. So here goes.

I did watch the whole thing. I liked the subject. Very nice place to film. The first part of the film shows the drone rising to a static place and parked there, filming the non-existent sun, but you picked a hazy day with clouds that obscured the horizon, thereby precluding any view of the sun. Then the drone yawed wildly 180 degrees down to the opposite view (west) , and again, static flying. At the end, you yawed quickly back and forth, dizzyingly, and re-settled on the original sunrise area to the east. Both yaws from east to west and from west to east should have been edited out.

So to "do better in terms of exposure" is not the question since the exposure was the best part of the video, considering there was no color grading which would have added some contrast to the haze and better colors. Oh, by the way, without a nice music track, you lose quite a lot.
Thanks . I was more interested in views of the colours , exposure itself , which looked very dull to me.

I wouldn't normally post up a video like that . You are correct in that it moved about a fair bit and yes I could have edited it And added some music (there is some on my other videos on the channel) but chose not to as my flying wasn’t the reason I wanteda view. I also tried a bunch of time lapse , off the drone , which when I put it together had similar issues in terms of quality. It’s not the drone though it’s me. I messed about with over exposing/under exposing but nothing looked right .

the haziness in the distance was another factor I am sure.

i appreciate the responses ... thank you ..
 
Thanks . I was more interested in views of the colours , exposure itself , which looked very dull to me.

I wouldn't normally post up a video like that . You are correct in that it moved about a fair bit and yes I could have edited it And added some music (there is some on my other videos on the channel) but chose not to as my flying wasn’t the reason I wanteda view. I also tried a bunch of time lapse , off the drone , which when I put it together had similar issues in terms of quality. It’s not the drone though it’s me. I messed about with over exposing/under exposing but nothing looked right .

the haziness in the distance was another factor I am sure.

i appreciate the responses ... thank you ..
So because of this thread, I have just spent the past 2 hours working again on my favorite project, which is capturing a sunset hyperlapse with the Mavic 2 Pro. For those of you in the forum who have been following this endless sage, here is the latest iteration and video.

This is yet another attempt at sunset hyperlapse. This sequence was made with a Mavic 2 Pro drone, 2 second intervals, 2 segments of 125 frames each, then developed in LR Timelapse 5 Holy Grail Method. The dark foreground was brightened with a graduated filter in the Lightroom portion of LRTimelapse. It was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro and stabilized with Warp Stabilization. This is a brand new (e.g.: refurbished by DJI) drone and IMU and Gimbal were calibrated the day of the shoot. Despite all of this, there is still wobbling and instability. I will repeat flight again, next time, eliminating most of the foreground which seems to give me the wobble. Hopefully, without the foreground, I will get less instability or wobble. Watch this and see for yourself.
 
Is the wobble not simply wind on the drone?
 
Is the wobble not simply wind on the drone?
I really do not know. It was a dead still, quiet evening when I did this and my other three attempts were identical, all with no noticeable wind. There may be some buffeting at the 150 foot height I did the flight, and the height on the RC varied between 100 and 101 feet throughout the flight. I have noted other people's flights and they are all flying, not holding in one place like I tried to do.
 
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