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I'm hoping someone can help with an issue I have trying to get a half decent video quality from an action cam I'm using. I appreciate this question may not be easy to answer for some (or maybe it is, hopefully??) so I'll give an overview of the problem before going into much more details. If the question is not for you, at least I've not wasted too much of your time and you can read something else more interesting.
Overview:
The video footage is taken from within a moving car. When I set the camera to have a manual EV of -5/3, then I get a quality I would be more than happy with. When the EV is set to auto, then most of the action area of the video is over exposed to the point of useless but I get a half decent view of the inside of the car. Now the simple answer is leave the EV set to -5/3 but I cannot do this which I will explain more below.
More details:
The action cam is an SJ6 Legend (I have same issues with an SJ4000 too). The camera is linked to my Android Phone running CameraFi Live and the video is streamed to Facebook. All good there when I test out of the car or in the car when there is little outside light.
The problem is when there is anything more than a very dull days amount of daylight outside the car, the exposure is extreme to the point of almost pure white. The EV setting being set to -5/3 resolves this (when recording to SD card) but when the camera is connected to the phone for streaming, it goes from "Video Camera" mode in to "PC Camera" mode (acts just like a webcam) and all the settings such as EV and ISO are set to auto or 0?? It basically forgets the settings I found to work. These settings all come back when in SD card recording mode, which is even more frustrating.
I've contacted the manufacturer about it and they say they this is normal behaviour. I asked if the settings could be made to work in the Web Cam mode and they said this would be considered for future firmware releases but they've not released a firmware for years now and I would be surprised if this will be resolved in any future releases.
I've been trying for nearly a year to get better video with little success. To try to make this work better, I read somewhere that an ND filter might improve the quality so I bought one that fits on the camera lens. I think it's improved slightly but not enough. I tried using a website on camera filters to see what setting I needed but I've either worked it out incorrectly, or it's not going to work as I thought it might. Unfortunately, I cannot find the ND filter details so I cannot say what it is exactly.
I have very little knowledge of camera filters / camera settings such as EV so perhaps someone can help with this or let me nkow if I can get a similar result using a strong enough ND filter with the standard EV settings?
Perhaps someone has a better idea or knows of some different software which will change this EV??
I've provided a link to some footage so you can see the difference between the camera with EV set to -5/3 and the one with no E setting changes (although it does have the ND filter on the lens).
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike
Footage without EV setting changes:
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10210722018524863 Look about half way through the video for the extreme examples of over exposure.
Footage with EV setting changes:
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10210726994809267
UPDATE: The ND filter I bought can be found below but there are no details on how much it filters?
ND Filters / Lens Filter for SJCAM SJ4000 Sport Camera & SJ4000 Wifi Sport DV Action Camera |
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2-12-2019 02:03:48