Video Flickering

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Hi, all - on my last couple of outings, I've run into several conditions that produce fairly severe video flickering. Tried a search, but don't see anything quite like what I'm seeing here. I'm flying a P4A that's just over two years old, never crashed. I am coming up on having to put some money into the craft due to stress shell cracks, so if my camera is going bad, I may want to reconsider investing in repairs.

At any rate, here's the video - I've had it happen on two outings, both over water. The sun was basically behind the camera, but perhaps off to the right side at a decent angle in the example video. I'm shooting 3840x2160 @30fps, not sure the shutter speed in this example. This looks to be something different than "exposure hunting" and in fact I tried the same flight with a fixed shutter speed with the same result. Thoughts appreciated.

 
That is a very interesting problem. When I look at it, the overall image is fine, it is the area of water that flickers with some banding. The takeaway is that the camera’s exposure system is working fine, but the encoding is having a problem in the areas of near constant tone.

What speed is your SD card? Cards that are too slow will show compression artifacts although not like this. SD cards should be rated U3 for reliable 4K work.

What did you upload to YouTube? Was it the original camera file from the SD card, ore some edited copy? Youtube re-encodes everything to reduce distribution bandwidth, so something could have happened there.

When you look at the original file on the computer, Do you see the variation there?
 
Hi, David, thanks for the reply. Yes, the original unedited file exhibits the same behavior, so it's not a YouTube or editing issue. I'm also thinking it's not an SD card issue, as I can actually see the flickering on my tablet while I fly. Videos taken immediately before and after look fine. Very odd.
 
sounds as if you have covered the bases. I looked through my P4adv footage for similar conditions and can’t find any. Maybe the camera assembly really is bad. Try the camera ribbon cable seating is the last I can think of.
 

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