All My video is "jerky"

Ankmax · May 7, 2016

I changed to MP4 and have watched several camera setting tutorials and I looked through manual and all the help questions here but can't find an answer. My P4 is brand new. The stills are fine but the video is very jerky. It's like it is taking a picture every 3 or 4 seconds and very little smooth video is showing. I have tried a couple of different micro SD cards. Any suggestions? Thank you

CaptainDrone798 · May 7, 2016

You'd have to post a sample, or link us to a sample of your video before we could comment on possible solutions.

WWK888 · May 7, 2016

It may be the computer you are using to view the video. If you are filming in 4K your computer needs to be able to handle it.

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Erised · May 8, 2016

Yep what WWK said. My tablet or laptop can't handle 4K. My video is fine on better computers with good video cards.

Gary Dearing · May 8, 2016

Not many devices can handle 4K, I film in 1080P.

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Stardog Champion · May 9, 2016

I was seeing the same thing, took this advice and eliminated most of the problem. While reviewing flight footage it's hard for the human eye to see the difference between 2.7 K and 4K. I reduced resolution and got less jerky video. I even went all the way down to1080 P and all but eliminated the problem. So for general flying and video, I don't know about anybody else but 1080 P seems to be fine and tends not to overwhelm the video processor on my Mac Air either.

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Mark Wattier · May 9, 2016

I stumbled on a solution to this problem. I had the same problem with my Phantom 4 out of the box. This is my first drone so I am/was really a novice. I found a video that explained that the jerkyness was likely due extremely high shutter speed. With the settings set to "auto" the camera will run the shutter speed up extremely high in order to reduce the amount of light entering the camera. The video recommended manually setting the shutter speed to no more than twice the fps. I used 1080p at 30 fps. So I set the shutter speed to 60. Making these changes removed ALL of the jerkyness. I was then able to produce great quality video. However, by manually reducing the shutter speed, and therefor allowing more light to enter the camera, I also had to add ND filters to reduce the light so that my mid-day videos were not washed out. Night time videos are great without a filter. Morning and late afternoon videos may be okay without filters, but sometimes I still put one on depending upon the brightness. This may not fix everyones jerkyness problems, but I did solve the ones I was having.