There are 3 factors that contribute to a proper exposure in photography. Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO.
1. Aperture - This controls the amount of light that gets through the lens. On a normal DSLR you can set this. It also controls depth of field. On the Phantom, its fixed at f2.8 and you can't change it. If you wish to cut light entering the sensor path, buy ND filters as they will cut the light but they do not affect depth of field.
2. Shutter speed. This controls how much time light is allowed to hit the sensor. A fast (or very short) shutter speed means less TIME that light has to hit the sensor. Conversely, a slow (or very long) shutter speed allows more TIME for light to hit the shutter. The more light that is allowed to hit the sensor, the lower your ISO can be and still maintain proper exposure. Shutter speed also controls motion blur. A fast shutter stops motion but sometimes this yields almsot too crisp look to video. Slower shutter speeds introduce slight blur that is common in standard film cinematography. That slight blur is why many apply an ND filter to their Phantom.
3. ISO - This is a rating of how sensitive the sensor (or film) is to light. The higher the number the more sensitive to light it becomes. Generally this is handled electronically by overdriving and saturating the sensor. This causes a noise artifact to be introduced in the image. The higher the ISO, the more noise you are going to get in your video/images. Generally the least noise you can achieve is best but there are times when, artistically, you desire noise. And times when noise is acceptable to be able to shoot in low light and get any image, even a noisy one.
So, its a balance. Raise shutter speed and you must also raise ISO. Lower shutter speed and you can lower ISO. Put an ND on and you can lower shutter speed. There are multiple combinations of settings to yield the same exposure. Which one of them you choose is generally based on the ancillary effects of the setting you change.
Say the scene is too bright. You have multiple options to deal with it. 1. introduce a ND filter which cuts light through the lens. 2. Raise your shutter speed to cut the time that light is allowed to hit the sensor. 3. Lower the ISO (assuming its not already at its lowest) to make the sensor less sensitive to light.
As for camera settings, Contrast, Saturation and Sharpness are used to control the quality of the image/video. I feel the P3 doesn't have the best settings out of the box. If your plan is to post process the video, then I would suggest turning Contrast down to -1, Saturation down to -2 and Sharpness down to -3. One note here, the negative setting on sharpness does not mean you are taking away sharpness, it means you are NOT adding it. Premiere and other post editing software do way better jobs at sharpening and you can try different settings to achieve your goal after the video is shot. If you add it in-camera, its really hard to take it back out later. Contrast down will help not push the ends of the histogram and will keep the video generally centered in the values without clipping black or whites. I feel the Phantom over saturates to begin with so takeing it down in camera removes quite a bit of color noise, especially if you shoot at higher ISO ratings. Again, these settings are based on the assumption you plan to post process.
I generally set my color balance to manual, 5000k. Auto tends to change the color balance as the scene changes. For example, you are tilted down recording nice green earth. When you tilt up to record blue sky, there will be a color shift as the AWB figures things out. With it set to manual 5000k. When the sun is low on the horizon, the daylight color temperature is down around 3000k. At high noon, its above 5600k. Since I am likely to be shooting sometime generally mid-morning to mid afternoon, I chose 5000k as a starting point. Its a little away from high noon without being "off" and a little up from morning and afternoon without being too far "off". And given a known constant shooting temperature, I have the same starting point for color correction during post processing. I don't have to guess what it was. I know, I set it.
Unless you plan to skip post processing totally, then I would not choose any of the auto modes of processing (sunny, cloudy, etc). Stick with DLog or None. They will do the least amount of damage to the original video and offer the greatest use of the sensor and the compression to produce the best source for post processing.
In the winter I tend to drive contrast down to -2 or -3 because its winter and snowy and white. Scenes are already naturally contrasty as hell. I don't want the Phantom adding to that. I also take the saturation down to -3 in the winter to compensate for the general lack of color anyway.
The settings I use tend to look muddy and not so good in-camera or on the device screen. But thats on purpose.
Here is a before and after...
Straight out of camera:
Color corrected and processed:
Notice how by bringing the contrast and saturation down in camera prevented it from clipping out the clouds and I was able to pull detail back in during post despite being pointed almost at the sun. And also notice that even though its pointed at the sun, it didn't clip blacks and I was able to bring back detail in the silhouetted tower which with stock settings would likely have been completely black.
And if the lack of saturation worries you. Don't be. This was shot at -3, -3. -3 Dlog:
This was a washed out mess in camera:
And even at summer settings of (c:-1, S:-2, X:-3) this was muddy looking in-camera:
Anyway, hope this primer gets you closer to where you want to be. Don't be afraid to experiment with the settings to find out what YOU like. Photography and videography are not set and forget hobbies. Each place you fly is likely to challenge your "default" settings. But having a set of defaults to return to is key. In your testing and learning, change ONE THING at a time! And learn what it does, learn how it affects your end product. Then move to the next setting and learn what it does. If you change too many things at once, how do you know which one affected your shots? Once you learn what each does, then you can start mixing them to fine tune. Most of all, go have fun
