Drone shutter speed
Also known as: aerial shutter speed
How long each frame on a drone camera is exposed, the setting that decides whether aerial movement looks smooth or stepped.
Updated
What it means
Shutter speed controls exposure time per frame, and on an aircraft it also controls how motion reads. Everything else about an aerial shot follows from this one number.
The convention is double the frame rate. Thirty frames wants a sixtieth, sixty frames wants a hundred and twentieth, and the match produces a natural amount of blur. Anything faster looks sharp and moves badly.
Fast shutter is occasionally deliberate. A High frame rate (HFR) clip intended for slow motion benefits from crisp frames, because each one is held on screen far longer than it was shot. Blur that reads as natural at full speed turns into smear at a quarter of it.
How it works in practice
Light is the obstacle. A sixtieth under a bright sky overexposes at base sensitivity, so the extra light has to go somewhere, and a filter is where. Closing the aperture instead softens the whole frame.
Filters are chosen for the conditions rather than left on. A fixed ND filter suits a stable afternoon, while changing light between flights argues for a variable one.
Manual is the only reliable setting. Locked shutter plus locked sensitivity plus a filter is three decisions made once, and every clip of the flight matches afterwards. Reviewing one clip is then enough to judge the whole card.
What to watch out for
Automatic exposure is the usual culprit. It holds brightness constant by moving shutter, which means a pass from shade into sunlight changes its motion character mid-shot. Half a clip smooth and half stepped is unusable.
Flicker appears under artificial light. Flying near stadium lighting at the wrong shutter produces rolling bands, and Rolling shutter artefacts make the same clip worse again.
Correcting it afterwards does not really work. Optical flow smoothing can soften a stepped pass, and the clip then looks processed instead of simply wrong. Reflying is faster than repairing.
How RawClip handles it
Smoothly exposed passes and stepped ones are both analysed, but the smoother clip wins where the two cover the same moment. A clip whose motion changes halfway through is usually trimmed to the half that reads consistently.