The power of ND filters

[Viciam]

I really didn't know ND filters made such a huge difference. For those of you who are thinking about getting them but are unsure on what they do...have a look at these 2 videos I made. Sky is the limit is without ND filters and Time with nature is using ND filters. Notice the sky is blown out in the tower video where as the colours are much better in Time with nature.

Hopefully that will help you decide whether you want ND filters or not. Also let me know what you guys think of my videos.

 

[Dronion]

Beautiful!
Also without ND filter it looks good anyway.
How high is the tower?

 

[gnirtS]

Err you do realise that ND filters have no effect on overall exposure? And also no effect on colour saturation (they're neutral. the key is in the name)....

NDs are there purely to slow your shutter speed to a level where you can get it slow enough to not have choppy/jerky video, especially on areas of rapid movement. They don't do anything else.

 

[Viciam]

Oh I see. Still whatever they do, they make a positive difference.

 

[Viciam]

Beautiful!
Also without ND filter it looks good anyway.
How high is the tower?

Thank you, the tower is 152 metres

 

[nismoz]

Those 2 vids look good. Good ND filters don't have any color cast on footage. It's possible that you have a ND/PL filter. PL filters will enhance color and eliminate reflection from foliage, water, metallic surfaces and glasses. If set at the right angle, you will notice a true, deeper blue in the sky when using PL filter.

ND filter is like what gnirtS said above. It is neutral. The main purpose is to lower the shutter speed to a desired speed, ideally 2x the FPS that you are shooting, to get a smooth footage. In your first video above, you may not see a big difference between ND and without ND since you were just filming stationary subjects and also flying high so everything appears to be moving very slowly. If you were filming a running car, horse or any fast moving subjects without ND and let's say the shutter speed is 1000th then they will appear very choppy.

Thanks for sharing. I like your video color. What did you use and did you have your color to D-log or cinelike and color grade it later?

 

[photoshop67]

I really didn't know ND filters made such a huge difference. For those of you who are thinking about getting them but are unsure on what they do...have a look at these 2 videos I made. Sky is the limit is without ND filters and Time with nature is using ND filters. Notice the sky is blown out in the tower video where as the colours are much better in Time with nature.

Hopefully that will help you decide whether you want ND filters or not. Also let me know what you guys think of my videos.

Sky blown out due to dynamic range required not consistent with camera chip in flying camera. ND Filter will have no effect on this.

 

[Viciam]

Those 2 vids look good. Good ND filters don't have any color cast on footage. It's possible that you have a ND/PL filter. PL filters will enhance color and eliminate reflection from foliage, water, metallic surfaces and glasses. If set at the right angle, you will notice a true, deeper blue in the sky when using PL filter.

ND filter is like what gnirtS said above. It is neutral. The main purpose is to lower the shutter speed to a desired speed, ideally 2x the FPS that you are shooting, to get a smooth footage. In your first video above, you may not see a big difference between ND and without ND since you were just filming stationary subjects and also flying high so everything appears to be moving very slowly. If you were filming a running car, horse or any fast moving subjects without ND and let's say the shutter speed is 1000th then they will appear very choppy.

Thanks for sharing. I like your video color. What did you use and did you have your color to D-log or cinelike and color grade it later?

You're welcome. Thanks, I used D cinelike, I believe it was +1 -1 -1 and I used after effects and magic bullet to colour grade it after.

 

[Viciam]

For this one, I used a PL4 filter. It was actually reasonable daylight outside but the effect with the pl filter came out like below. What do you guys think?

 

[gnirtS]

Well the polariser part of it was doing nothing as you were shooting directly into the sun. Directly into or away from polarisers have no effect. And that's assuming you even twisted it to line it up correctly before hand.

 

[Viciam]

I havent a clue. I just bought them and have been trial and erroring so far. But they certainly give my videos the look and feel i like having

 

[PolarPro]

Err you do realise that ND filters have no effect on overall exposure? And also no effect on colour saturation (they're neutral. the key is in the name)....

NDs are there purely to slow your shutter speed to a level where you can get it slow enough to not have choppy/jerky video, especially on areas of rapid movement. They don't do anything else.

It's accurate that ND filters have no effect on color, but they do affect overall exposure. "Neutral" is in reference to the colors, but "Density" means the filter is dense enough to prevent some of the light from passing through. It's similar to when you put sunglasses on - colors normally look a little muted or washed out, and everything gets less bright overall.

ND filters by themselves do nothing to change the actual shutter speed of the camera (though with the settings on auto, the shutter speed may change as the camera compensates for the addition of the filter). People primarily use ND filters on drones in order to enable them to change their shutter speed in order to preserve the popular cinematic motion blur look. This usually requires the shutter speed to be approximately double the fps, so for 30fps (as an example) you'd want 1/60 shutter speed. Without a filter this could result in overexposed shots, as 1/60 is somewhat of a slow shutter speed and allows a lot of light to hit the sensor. Adding an ND filter to the lens reduces the overall exposure of the shot before any light even hits the sensor, so even with the slower shutter speed everything should be properly exposed.

Because of the prevalence of this use of ND filters for drone flight, many users come away thinking ND filters only alter the shutter speed and are used only for video, but this is inaccurate. ND filters have been around and used for ground-based photography and video applications for quite some time. They're not necessary for every shoot, but are an extremely valuable tool to have available because of the additional exposure control they offer.

- Oliver from PolarPro

 

[Mako79]

It's funny how ND filters are used in the Droning world. Slowing down shutter speeds to get 2x framerates to achieve motion blur in video. Lol and it works =)
We forget that ND filters were used for still photography to capture time in a still photo, majority of times with the movement of water. I'm still yet to get an Aerial still of a waterfall using the ND filter technique (need a darker ND 64+ filter and get the Mavic to stay very still for 1-3 seconds).
Hopefully the new consumer drone cameras won't have fixed apertures so we can manually adjust our shutter speeds for video and photos.

 

[Mavic 9]

A good video on the use of ND filters can be found here

 

[Viciam]

ND filters are something I couldn't do without to be honest.

 

[CamoGreg]

How did you do the time lapse ?

 

[Viciam]

How did you do the time lapse ?

I used a pl4 filter and recorded 25 min flight and speeded it up into around 20 seconds. Then used adobe after effects to bring out the colours and to stablize the footage. Hope it helps.

 

[CamoGreg]

I used a pl4 filter and recorded 25 min flight and speeded it up into around 20 seconds. Then used adobe after effects to bring out the colours and to stablize the footage. Hope it helps.

Thanks !

 

[Kilrah]

There is no footage in either of these videos that was effected by the use of an ND filter, apart maybe the moving cars and horses in the 2nd but it seems you didn't have the settings right for it to show either.
100% placebo effect in this case If you're not happy with the blown out sky in the first video you just had to adjust exposure compensation a tad lower and it would have come out right. There's also some blown out sky in the 2nd actually, again the filter won't change a thing there.

Nice footage and grading though.

 

[Viciam]

There is no footage in either of these videos that was effected by the use of an ND filter, apart maybe the moving cars and horses in the 2nd but it seems you didn't have the settings right for it to show either.
100% placebo effect in this case If you're not happy with the blown out sky in the first video you just had to adjust exposure compensation a tad lower and it would have come out right. There's also some blown out sky in the 2nd actually, again the filter won't change a thing there.

Nice footage and grading though.

Im not sure, the filters allow me to have the settings I want like double speed of frame rate the sky then becomes detailed rather than over exposed