camera settings + dark video -- a fix

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I have some information on a fix for a problem that took me a while to figure out. I am hoping that it might be useful to others.

During my first series of P3 flights, I noticed that the videos were coming out dark. I didn't realize until months later that this was due to accidentally hitting buttons on the controller and changing the ev setting. I have learned that it is essential to check this setting before each flight! The P3 is a wonderful device, but it's unfortunate that a button that does something so important is located in a place where it's hard to avoid accidentally hitting it. I'm not sure which button it is, but it's on the front right side of the controller.

I wanted to salvage the dark videos as best as possible. I first tried Quicktime 7 on the Mac, which allows one to adjust brightness and contrast. This makes a dark video look great, but it doesn't allow one to save it with the changes. I found some software that does allow one to save such changes, but it introduces serious problems. I was able to nicely fix the videos by importing into iMovie 10.1.4, adjusting the brightness, and then outputting to 1080p. I first tried this approach by importing 1080p versions into iMovie, but this resulted in low quality output. I was able to get good results by importing 4K files directly into iMovie.

In cases in which I wanted to crop movies or combine more than one of them, I did so in Quicktime 7 prior to importing into iMovie. Quicktime 7 allows one to crop and combine movies, and the Pro version allows one to output the results. The processing with Quicktime 7 isn't very time consuming. For a movie of about ten minutes, the processing in iMovie took about a half hour on my Mac laptop.
 
Oh the dreaded EV Compensation... Been there done that, it is way to easy to change accidentally. Thanks for sharing!
 
but it's unfortunate that a button that does something so important is located in a place where it's hard to avoid accidentally hitting it

Each and every button has its designated function, where the tiny wheel on the right side is to change the EV compensation in auto mode or either ISO or exposure time in manual mode.

I'd recommend you to start/stop recording tap the button on the app of your mobile device and keep the fingers off the buttons and the wheel on the right side.

Do you also change the camera pitch accidentally with the wheel on the left side?
 

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