Drone ISO
Also known as: aerial ISO, drone sensor gain
The sensitivity setting on a drone camera, kept as low as the light allows because small aerial sensors turn gain into visible noise quickly.
Updated
What it means
ISO on an aircraft behaves as it does anywhere else, with one difference: the sensor is small and the penalty for raising it arrives sooner. What passes on a phone screen does not survive a television.
Base sensitivity is where these cameras are honest. At the bottom of the range a drone sensor delivers clean, gradable frames, and every stop above it trades detail for brightness.
The complication is that shutter is not free to move. Holding motion blur means holding shutter, so sensitivity and an ND filter are the only two controls left, and one of them lives in a filter pouch rather than in a menu.
How it works in practice
Daylight flying stays at base. Nothing about a bright afternoon requires gain, and a filter handles the excess light that would otherwise force a faster shutter.
Dusk is where decisions happen. Blue hour material can be shot one or two stops up and still grade, while anything beyond that is a clip that will need Denoise and will lose fine detail to it.
A locked value beats an automatic one. Sensitivity drifting during a pass changes the look mid-shot, which is harder to fix than a single wrong choice. One value per flight is the usual discipline.
What to watch out for
Noise is worst in the sky. Even gradients show it first, so a clip that looks acceptable over a forest reveals blotches the moment the horizon is in frame. Flat sky is the honest test of any aerial clip.
Compression makes it worse. Noise is expensive to encode, so a high-sensitivity clip at a given Bitrate loses detail everywhere, not only in the dark areas.
Automatic sensitivity also fights stabilisation. As gain rises the image gets noisier, and Electronic image stabilization (EIS) has fewer clean features to track, which shows up as small jitter.
How RawClip handles it
Noisy aerials are still usable and are analysed like anything else, though cleaner clips from the same flight tend to win when both cover the same moment. Noise reduction is applied during assembly rather than left to show at every cut into a mounted camera shot.