Dark footage

A-A-Ron · Mar 29, 2017

I'm doing a project with horses and it seems really hit or miss whether the footage from the P4P+ is useable. Attached is a still frame. It looks generally poor. It has a small bit of color correction, but regardless of how i correct it, the blacks are extremely black, with no discernible detail. I'm shooting at 3840x2160, AWB, MP4, NTSC, no "style", D-Log, H 2.64 encoding, AF/MF focus assistant is OFF. In addition, the footage generally seems too "sharp" (hope that makes sense).

The only thing I can think of is that the subjects are in shadow because on the opposite side of the track, the footage looks good...

Any suggestions?

KevMo Photog · Mar 29, 2017

A-A-Ron said:
I'm doing a project with horses and it seems really hit or miss whether the footage from the P4P+ is useable. Attached is a still frame. It looks generally poor. It has a small bit of color correction, but regardless of how i correct it, the blacks are extremely black, with no discernible detail. I'm shooting at 3840x2160, AWB, MP4, NTSC, no "style", D-Log, H 2.64 encoding, AF/MF focus assistant is OFF. In addition, the footage generally seems too "sharp" (hope that makes sense).

The only thing I can think of is that the subjects are in shadow because on the opposite side of the track, the footage looks good...

Any suggestions?

Your just under exposed man. I'm guessing your in Auto mode and shooting into brighter sky by no light on this side of riders. You'll have to go off of manual and open it up with aperture or shutter. Or adjust your EV settings to the plus side until you get bright you want. Use your histogram if can. Chart that shows you where all of your exposure is located from darks to lights. Using Auto exposure is gonna give you fits when your shooting with sun that in not kind of behind you. Your shooting a really dark subject here with dark ground ect. The meter is exposing for the brighter sky so it closes the camera down some to you have to compensate for that with raising your EV. Also as for the sharpness, if this is a screen shot from a video clip your not getting the full quality 20mp still image that you do if you shoot a still only. So your pic looks kind of garbled because of lower res it looks like to me. Hope this helps a little I would suggest that you watch a little Youtube on exposure using Histogram and what it all means.

A-A-Ron · Mar 29, 2017

Thanks KevMo. That's great advice. However, by adjusting the camera settings for the sun on one side of the track, isn't that going to make the other side of the track (180 degrees from the image's POV) over exposed?

Mr. Salty · Mar 29, 2017

Speaking as a longtime professional photographer, that is an unavoidable problem when you're shooting on a bright, sunny day with no clouds. In the image above, you're shooting toward the sun, so the subjects are essentially silhouettes.

Do your best to put the sun behind the drone, or shoot on a slightly overcast day (then boost contrast and color saturation in editing).

KevMo Photog · Mar 29, 2017

A-A-Ron said:
Thanks KevMo. That's great advice. However, by adjusting the camera settings for the sun on one side of the track, isn't that going to make the other side of the track (180 degrees from the image's POV) over exposed?

Yes it is. It's kind of like you can't have your cake and eat it too! LOL. But yes especially at that time of day your gonna have issues with holding detail with your subjects you have. Thats where editing comes in and take clips and start to piece together all your shots that you have custom set for that day and light. And like Mr. Salty said it's gonna be a lot better if you get light from behind or off to a side behind your shot instead of into it. This camera is pretty good at holding detail in dark and lights in a 11 f stop range but it has exposed pretty good to be able pull shadows up to your way brighter highlites without getting noise in them. Like I kind of did in this shot of our local hospital the other day. I still did not have detail in the actual sun area itself but if I had exposed the shot much darker then I would not have been able to pull the hospital and everything else up enough without unusable noise in those areas.