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DJI Go App: Video Settings

So we're talking about video. You've learned about the drone roles, the various parts of the drone, some of the terminology related to that. How to fly. We've gone over photo settings, and we'll just spend this last segment talking about video. So, I wanna share with you guys some tips. I wanna talk to you guys about some accessories, and then give you maybe, a little bit of homework of things you guys can practice to take your drone game to the next level, alright? So, we'll go ahead and get started. I am going to do a quick demo with the drone. I'll flip open. I'll turn on my drone. I'll turn on my controller. I'll show you just a couple things, settings wise, that I want you to pay attention to, and I'll then talk about a couple of the settings a little bit more specifically. Show you a couple things on the screen and we'll do a little bit of bouncing back. So, I'm gonna really quick fire up my drone. (electric whirring) And while that's booting up, I wanna let you know that there a...

re a few things that you need to be mindful of when you're doing video. You need to think about what is my output? Where is this headed? Is it going to just on social? Is it going on Facebook? Is it going on Vimeo? On Youtube? Do I wanna turn this into a commercial, right? What is your output? If you start there then some of these settings are gonna be a little bit more helpful. I'm gonna just bypass some of these things that we have already gone over. I'm gonna enter into my camera. And I'm going to pull up my video settings by switching to the video mode. So, I know I'm in video because I know I now have the record button. You can always toggle back and forth right there. Another quick tip is if you want to go to photo, click on the shutter, that's right here. This is also the exposure dial, or click on record if you wanna switch to video. So, depending on where you are, what you wanna do, it'll know, you just gotta click on one of those two. And just to make sure we're all on the same page again, this is your gimbal control so this dial. When you move it, the gimbal moves and this is your exposure. Just wanna make sure we're all on the same page about that. So, I'm gonna point this out and in my video settings, I'll pull that up. I do shoot manual. I talk a little more specifically about all these things in the photo E class, but I just wanna let you know that this video size, it's important to pick the size of, recording the size of whatever you're gonna output in. So if you need to output to 4K, you need to shoot in 4K, right? But if you're just gonna post to Instagram, Facebook, something casual like that, 4K may be overkill. You could drop it down to something like HD and you could probably be just fine. Now, I will say, the one tip for you guys, is you could choose, if you have a computer that's fast enough and it probably, really is gonna depend on your computer. 4K just brings your computer to like a grinding halt it feels like. What you could do is you could, if you have a fast enough computer, shoot still 4K, and then reposition your frame later in a smaller composition, so if you could pull up and premier a 1080 and bring in your huge 4K and you can re-shift around the image. So that's a cool trick that I will sometimes use, depending on what I'm shooting. So we have 4K, we have 2.7K and we have 1080, and then down here we have the and this is where you can get into, really, some of the slow-mo stuff that I will show you guys when we pull that up. So if we have 4K, 4K up to 60 frames per second, specifically on the phantom, 2.7 you can shoot 60 frames per second and we can only get that 120 frames per second at the 720. Kind of a trade off there, I imagine that's going to change. Okay, let me see what I have here. So, switching back to my keynote real quick, I have a couple of the options right here. I bounce back and forth between these depending on what we're doing. So for instance, I'm really mindful of when I'm shooting 4K because my laptop will, it gets so slow and it takes up so much footage but for me I'll shoot in 4k because I'm thinking about, "Well what if I want it for stock later?" Right? So then I want a huge image. But for instance, for the video series that we shot for you guys, We shot in HD because we're broadcasting it out in HD. So I adjusted my settings to the HD, because we knew it was gonna stay in HD. So that's an example of me asking the director, "Hey, what's the output?" He told me and I then switched accordingly. So, I always ask the output. I wanna be informed before I make that decision. The big tip though is if your computer can handle it and you have enough hard drive space shoot as big as you can and then just scale stuff down or reposition it. That's a really good tip. Generally speaking, I know we're seeing more and more TVs and stuff becoming 4k, but if you're posting something to Vimeo, at least right now, not everyone has a 4k monitor so there's that trade off. Something for you guys to think about. Okay, I'm gonna switch to my next screen here, and I'm gonna go to frames per second. Now, this is really important for you guys to think about what is your angle on this? We have 24 frames per second. We have 30. We have 60. We have 120. What is the setting that you need and why? So, for instance, 24 frames per second that's set to be the cinematic setting. It gives you a cinematic look. There's 6 frames less per second than 30 frames, so we get more motion blur. In photos that's not good, motion blur is not good, right? In video, though that's what we use to make things look more natural. You're going from one photo to the next and it blurs the transition. So, in video we do want some motion blur. So, the thing you need to think about is if I just really care about having that cinematic look and this is just one way to achieve that there's so many different factors: lighting blah blah blah. One way though is you can just set your footage to 24 frames per second. Now, why might you wanna use 30 frames per second? You might want to use that where you're thinking, "Alright, I don't know if I want to slow this clip down in the future, or if I just wanna maybe down convert it to 24?" but it gives you some wiggle room to play with it later. So, I have a friend, he always shoots 30, but then he exports out his videos at 24. And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Cause I just like to have the option to slow my footage down a little bit." Now having six extra frames per second, isn't a lot, but it can help. The more frames you have per second the more slow motion you can get that's gonna look really good. Hence, why if you're gonna shoot slo-mo you might wanna just put it into 30 frames per second. Oh sorry! 60 frames per second, excuse me. 60 frames per second right away gives you a lot more frames to work with. So, I'll show you guys a couple examples, but the main one I'm focusing on is the 120 frames per second. And that's because that's like incredible. I can't believe that we have frames per second on a drone. Like seriously, right that's amazing. So, I'll show you guys a clip. I'll show you what that looks like and why you might wanna use it, but I'll let you know I'm very specific when I switch it over to that. I don't shoot everything in 120 frames per second. It's just when I know I want the shot to be slo-mo or not. So, I'm gonna go to my next slide, and I just filmed this really quick when I took the Mavick Air out or the Mavick Pro 2 for my first flight. I kicked it over to the 120 frames, and you can just see what the water looks like. This is straight out of the camera. I didn't do any tweaks to it in terms of adjusting the frames per second. Pretty cool right? And think about that. You have 120 frames per second that just made that. You could then slow down that and get even slower right? So, pretty cool way to play with it. Just to show you one of the clips on my demo reel. This shot of the waves, I did shoot this at 120 frames per second. It's like you just get that wave crashing and the spray just going off right? It's slo-mo. It's silky smooth right? So pretty cool. Again, pick your frame rate. I generally am shooting 24 frames per second, but that's probably just because I'm used to doing that from my video days, when I was shooting a lot of short films and stuff. But if you wanna take the advice of what one of my buddies does 30 frames might give you some wiggle room. Yeah. I could take a question. Yeah. Can you talk about what size card you have and when you're shooting video in the drone? Yeah. Yeah, so I'm shooting with a 64 gig card. 64 gig. Yeah, I'm using a Lexar. So the key though is you wanna get a card that is really fast. That's the most important thing. I had mentioned to you that I was shooting 4k video on my Mavick Air, and I had a super slow card. It was my back up card, and I got the footage and it was all skippy because it couldn't record to the card fast enough. One thing to keep in mind, that I didn't mention, is the Mavick Air and the Mavick Pro they have onboard memory so it's only 8 gigs. So, you're not gonna get very far, but you can record to that and of course that's fast enough. It'll go pretty quick. So you definitely wanna get a card that's more of a nice back up. Because there has definitely been times where I didn't go through my check list. I'd go up. I forgot my card. The sun's going down. I'm like, "Oh my gosh!" I literally lost the sunset, like it's gone right? To bad so sad right? Alright, I'm gonna switch to my next slide here. Let's see what I got. Okay frame rate. This is the next thing. You've figured out how big do you want your frame now what is your frame rate? Now, this is where things get really interesting. If we're borrowing from the way people make films, we then take the idea of the 180 rule. This is for your shutter. And the important thing to think about for this is if you know your frame rate. Let's just stick with 30 frames because that's an easy round number. If the 180 rule is to double the frame rate for my shutter, if I'm shooting at 30 frames per second, I should use a shutter of 160th. Right? So that's easy math. If you're gonna shoot with 24 frames per second, obviously that's 48 there's not a 148th so you've gotta do like 150th. Or you know as close to that as possible. What this does though, is it, you can read all about this research it on your own I'm not gonna go too far into it, but it creates a nice balance between the motion blur, based on your frame rate. So, check it out. There's lots of cool examples online. You can see the difference. But basically what I do is I made a little chart for you guys. If you're doing 24 frames per second, aim for about 150th. If you're doing 30 frames per second, aim for about 160th of a second on your shutter. If you're doing 60 frames per second, if you double that, that's 120th but there's not a 120th, so do 125th. You're just trying to get as close as possible. And then for 124 frames per second, you wanna do 1/250th of a second. So this is a good thing to keep in mind. I'm just doubling it. I'm trying to get as close to this as possible. I will let you in on a little tip before there was indie filters which I'm gonna explain to you in a minute. If I needed to darken the scene or lighten the scene or whatever the situation was I would try to if I was shooting at 30 frames per second. I would try to use a multiple of 30. So, I might have to go really far away from that, but I would still be using a multiple of 30. It's not gonna produce the same exact look, but at least I'm staying within the multiple. Not to worry too much about that now, especially for drones to have an aperture adjustment and now that we have indie filters which I'm gonna talk about now.