Stabilising footage generally has a huge impact on the sharpness and overall quality of the image. On the larger Cinelifter systems I try to use as little stabilisation as possible to maintain resolution. GoPro stabilisation such as ReelSteady often discards more than 30% of the original image! When using instagram, facebook or youtube for delivery it is difficult to tell what a hit the quality has taken.

Ideally you want to have your shutter at 180 degrees (twice your frame rate) so for 25fps this would be a 50th of a second, at 50fps it would be 100th of a second etc. This creates a natural and believable amount of motion blur in the image. You might say this is a cinematic look. Most freestyle pilots stick to a 180 degree shutter and no stabilisation. On a bright day even at ISO 100 you will end up with too much light to get a good exposure with these lower shutter speeds. This issue is solved using ND filters. I commonly use an ND8 or ND16 on sunny days to allow me to get the correct exposure.

If you are flying aggressively and using a lot of stabilisation off camera, eg with ReelSteady then using a 180 degree shutter can cause artefacts in the stabilised image. Many people think this is vibrations from the drone but it is actually the result of taking a frame that has been blurred with high speed movement and making it appear stationary – stabilising it. For this reason it is a good idea to use a 90 degree shutter when using ReelSteady. This means a shutter of 100 at 25fps or 200 at 50fps. As you get used to moving the drone around more gently and smoothly you can go back to a 180 degree shutter in some cases as the stabilisation will be working less hard.

These are my settings for most situations:

> 2.7k 4:3 50fps or 4k 4:3 25fps
> Wide
> In camera stabilisation: Off – this means I can use the unstabilised footage, de-fish and crop the top and bottom to make the image 16:9 or use ReelSteady to stabilise it
> Low light – off
> Shutter – discussed above
> EV Comp – no effect as GoPro is always exposed manually
> White Balance – 5500k outdoors, sometimes auto for indoors
> ISO Min & Max – always set to the same and as low as possible to prevent the camera laddering the exposure.
> Sharpness – Low, If working with an ISO > 100 then it’s much better to avoid in camera sharpening. With RSG, sharpening in post after the crop and interpolation has happened will produce a better result. Having said that I often shoot medium because sharpening in post is demanding even with a really good computer, this is for convenience though not IQ
> Flat Colour – On
> High Bitrate – Yes

Some more shutter speed info I posted on facebook:
Welcome! It took me a while to work out! In Benoit Finck’s clip above he has made totally the right decision of course. Sometimes with less movement in the shot you can get away with a 100th shutter at 50fps (180 degrees), as each frame is exposing for the same amount of time at a 90 degree shutter at 25fps.. having said that shooting a 180 degree shutter at 25fps results in a 50th of a second shutter speed and you have to be very careful to fly smooth and not put in any big moves or the motion blur artefacts are very obvious. Freestyle pilots and anyone in film/tv love a 180 degree 24/25/30fps shutter. You get a very natural look to the movement but you can’t stabilise it aggressively. A lot of cinelifter pilots prefer a 90 degree shutter at 24/25/30fps as there is so much movement in a lot of the shots it kinda tames the blur a little and gives more scope for stabilisation in post.

If you are flying really smooth and gentle on the sticks with no fast/uneven pan or tilt you can use a 50th of a second but even then artefacts will creep in sometimes. At 100th of a second you can be a little more agressive with your movements, at 200th the bar is raised again, you do still see artefacts from time to time but it’s very rare for it to ruin a shot. 50th, 100th or 200th are all valid depending on the situation. (60th, 120th, 240th in NTSC)

For UK drone ops: alex AT designtuneoperate.co.uk