Hi all,
I am getting unusable footage when set to 4K/30 when mounted to my motorcycle.
I have a Gopro Hero 9 that was doing the same until I found out I shouldn't set my frame rate to anything except auto (not happy with no motion blur results but it's buttery smooth stabilization).
Is there a simple fix using the Pocket 2?
Thanks,
Randy

I think the Pocket 2 seems better than the Pocket 1 when subjected to vibration, but I don't think either is particularly suited to this kind of task.  I wonder whether there's a problem with wind vibrating the actual gimbal head on the motorbike?

The Pocket is not intended to be an action camera.  The gimbal can only correct so much vibration and is really only suited to handheld use in my opinion.  If I want an action camera I use a GoPro 9.

fansfe82067d Posted at 5-28 14:27
I think the Pocket 2 seems better than the Pocket 1 when subjected to vibration, but I don't think either is particularly suited to this kind of task.  I wonder whether there's a problem with wind vibrating the actual gimbal head on the motorbike?

Apparently not, I get the jitter when just starting off before I even get any wind noise.

John Walker Posted at 5-28 14:37
The Pocket is not intended to be an action camera.  The gimbal can only correct so much vibration and is really only suited to handheld use in my opinion.  If I want an action camera I use a GoPro 9.

oh man...I figured it would be a great action cam with a built in gimbal...crap, anyone want to buy a hardly used Pocket 2 Combo kit?!

You need to mount it somewhere with less vibration - either get a vibration dampener for the mount but best would be to mount it with a chest harness or to the helmet.

djiuser_LgExQ2pYgxAN Posted at 5-28 23:59
You need to mount it somewhere with less vibration - either get a vibration dampener for the mount but best would be to mount it with a chest harness or to the helmet.

I was just about to say the same thing.  If the speed of the vibrations is faster than the Pocket 2's gimbal head can physically move to correct the resulting visual disturbance, there's bound to be a problem.  Others have found that chest mounting or the like is the fix.

Chest mounting is not a solution for me as I don't want to shoot thru the windsheild.
I just thought there would be a simple solution like with my gopro...very disappointing but thanks all for your help.

Chest mounting is not a solution for me as I don't want to shoot thru the windsheild.
I just thought there would be a simple solution like with my gopro...very disappointing but thanks all for your help.

GRandyB Posted at 5-29 05:18
Chest mounting is not a solution for me as I don't want to shoot thru the windsheild.
I just thought there would be a simple solution like with my gopro...very disappointing but thanks all for your help.

There is a huge difference between the gopro (with all moving parts internally) and the DJI Pocket 2, where all the moving parts are “outside” the device, and hence susceptible to wind also. Vibration is one thing, and the Pocket can easily compensate for really dramatic vibrations. This is done by altering the angle of the head, but if you also subject the Pocket 2 to headwind, fluctuating or not, any head movement will have added pressure from the headwind. Exaggerating/amplifying the intended compensation.

If I’m right, try - just as an experiment - to give the Pocket 2 moving parts the same conditions, as the moving parts in a GoPro. I.e. mount the Pocket 2 behind the windshield. My theory is, that you will experience far less problems.

If my theory is correct, and you still insist on mounting thePocket 2 in front of the windshield, you can probably prevent most - if not all - bad effects by placing the pocket 2 inside the waterproof case accessory - creating the same protected condition for the moving parts, as inside the GoPro.

The test is quick, free and easy. Mount behind the windscreen. If the problem disappears or is drastically lowered, you have actual proof, that it’s the combination of vibrations AND headwind, that’s causing the problem (the headwind being the real culprit here). Give it a try, and tell us how it went.

As you are aware, it only takes a slight breeze to cause wind noise. This is a clip from it being mounted with a 3 suction cup mount on the side of a car.

It's pretty easy to see wind has nothing to do with the unstable footage.
That said, even if I did get the micro vibration issue fixed, it won't work for the road footage I want to capture because you can't lock the gimbal and I need to show the FPV effect of hard banking into a curve...IOW I don't want the gimbal leveling off the horizon.
I'll still be able to use it to get smooth close up shots of nature on the selfie stick I bought for it.

I see your problem and I too have the same when it's mounted to my bike. One other solution I've been meaning to try but haven't gotten around to yet is a 4th axis stabilizer mounted somehow on the bike but that takes a lot of space, so either that or a electronically stabilized camera. Another tip is that the wireless mic and a smal lav mic with wind fur mounted behind the helmet gives great audio.

GRandyB Posted at 5-29 15:38
As you are aware, it only takes a slight breeze to cause wind noise. This is a clip from it being mounted with a 3 suction cup mount on the side of a car.
This is a clip
It's pretty easy to see wind has nothing to do with the unstable footage.

Sorry, but I see (nearly) no jitters at all! I see lot’s of YouTube delivery problems, but…

I’m not trying to tell you, how you have to do your recordings in the following. Just pointing out a few facts, that have helped me get around a few problems in my time.

The Youtube quality is lousy, even on my connection 350/350 megabit full duplex fibre channel (typical YouTube connection speed 48-96 megabit or more). Whether I kick the video onto my big UHD TV (fairly new), show it on my old iPad Air 2 or a newer iPad 10.5 Pro, everything runs as smooth as “a babys bottom”. On my completely new Apple Mac Mini with M1 chip, I can just about make out some, very small, vertical jitters on my 4k Dell monitor (DCI-P3 color space) placed around 50cm/half a yard from my eyes, but then I have to concentrate (and only the latter half of the video has stabilised sufficiently on YouTube - the first half has all kinds of “weird adjustments” going on.

Quality cannot really be judged on YouTube. The rendering quality in my end is abysmal, so bad, that it in itself introduces jittering “outlines” in the top of i.e. the trees. Also ask yourself: How many look at your works at a distance of half a yard, from a highly tuned, DCI P3 pro monitor with 2160p resolution in top tuned colors. Any 1080p 'hobby' video can show tiny jitters periodically in this case. It would be near wonder, if it didn't happen at all at "double size" display!

A lot of people experience all sorts of bad quality - including jitters in any and all directions as well as speed - using YouTube. It even happens to me, but very seldom since the infrastructure to/from my country, and to the distribution point to my connection is really high quality all the way from the source. The video I got from YouTube had these data in the ‘frozen’ video in statistics for nerds (note, to avoid my own shadow, I had to take the image from an angle, and then ‘de-skew’  afterwards):

YouTube statistics for nerds

I noted, that I get 1080p/30fps from YouTube. Is that your original material? Did you perform any treatment - like downsampling from 4k etc. - that involved rendering to final format? At least use 60 (or 50 fps in 90-95% of the world outside the US and other 60Hz mains countries).

Do you have a longer sequence of your original recording, that you could make available for download from OneNote or Google Drive?

When I have really challenging recordings, I max everything out (adjusted for the mains frequency in the zone, I'm at at the moment). In my case, it is 2160p/50 fps, but in the US I would choose 60 fps (in order to minimise any chance of unwanted ‘side effects’ in areas, where mains is 60Hz)  with maximum available quality (100 megabit on Pocket 2).

What SDXC card do you use? In theory, you could get away with a lesser quality, but cards certified as V30 (minimum sustained 30MB/sec) will often, if not consistently perform better, than many cards only specified as U3 (30MB/sec, but not necessarily sustained, as required for video - I have a few bad examples from the time before V30 became standard). The standards mess is seen in full and frightening galore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card

If I see anything awry in POST, I activate stabilisation (DaVinci Resolve 17 (free) or iMovie (free) or FCPX (paid). Where possible, I activate “Tripod” mode ‘rock solid view’, but seldom available on quick moving, low flying taxis driven by former fighter pilots (it seems ;-) in inner city Rome with plenty of cobble stone streets toward the Vatican (used my old Osmo Pocket on vacation in Rome in April 2019 with veeeery good results).

At 100 megabit/sec, you need an absolute minimum of 12.5 megabyte/sec, and cards with higher “umpffhh” will leave room for camera handling overhead. Cards, that are juuust about good enough, may introduce visible artefacts too; sometimes also visible as jitters (a periodic dropped frame or a few missing lines in 30 fps is often far more visible, than a dropped frame in 60 fps). Some jitters - especially the vertical type - are really a kind of rolling shutter resulting in a “jello effect”.

I experienced an especially bad example, when filming a ride through the streets of Singapore handheld Panasonic GX80 camera at 4k/25fps placed in the front on an unsuspended tricycle on a ride with Tricycle Uncle. Certainly more leisurely, than your example, alas… It was (sea?)sickening to look at; images went from stretched to compressed and vice versa depending on the camera moving/angling up or down. Now imagine a sensor, that can read the content of each frame much faster (60fps instead of 30fps), then the “jello effect” becomes more like a jitter, and if the camera can read the complete sensor in “one go”, you have what is called global shutter.

In most cameras, even if exposure (of each line/section?) is only 1/2000 sec - the sensor is read piecemeal from top to bottom. Line after line, taking - let’s say 30 ms in all reading from top to bottom line at 30fps. At 60 fps, the camera cannot use more than max. 16ms (typically a bit less) to read the content of the sensor lines from top to bottom. Result: less jello/jitter, than at 30 fps. In your example: Try 60 fps.

There are filters, that try to counter act the effect in POST, but on a fast moving motor cycle, the problem is, that the top lines of the sensor are read at a larger distance from a far away object, than the bottom line in the same frame. You see that as tilting tree-trunks or telegraph poles etc. in a video from a motor cycle, car, bus or train. Especially on the super fast moving Maglev train from Pudong Airport in Shanghai to the city, when scheduled to run at 430+ kph to please the tourists, nothing outside the windows within a short distance is rendered as vertical, when filming.

Personally I would also experiment with manual focus or locked focus in your case (tend to lessen “jitters” caused by ‘jittery autofocus adjustments’ caused by ‘step motors’ moving lens groups in tiny steps to alter focus - haven’t tried, if focus locking is possible on the Pocket 2 - haven’t felt the need - yet! ;-)

Hope at least some of the many words can be of use to your or any other person working their way through this text ;-)

Regards

"That said, even if I did get the micro vibration issue fixed, it won't work for the road footage I want to capture because you can't lock the gimbal and I need to show the FPV effect of hard banking into a curve...IOW I don't want the gimbal leveling off the horizon."  

Er.... that's what the FPV gimbal mode is for.  OK, it dampens the movement a little, but it shows the lean perfectly well.  There's any number of videos on YouTube showing that.   I suspect that if you changed the lean of the bike faster than the damping of the gimbal in FPV mode, well - you wouldn't be posting here any more!

Osmo Action is more suitable for this active setup.

fansfe82067d Posted at 5-30 04:59
"That said, even if I did get the micro vibration issue fixed, it won't work for the road footage I want to capture because you can't lock the gimbal and I need to show the FPV effect of hard banking into a curve...IOW I don't want the gimbal leveling off the horizon."  

Er.... that's what the FPV gimbal mode is for.  OK, it dampens the movement a little, but it shows the lean perfectly well.  There's any number of videos on YouTube showing that.   I suspect that if you changed the lean of the bike faster than the damping of the gimbal in FPV mode, well - you wouldn't be posting here any more!

That's true but in the drone world it means locking the gimbal to wear it doesn't move whatsoever (Mavic Air 2)...giving a more realistic feel from the motorcyle perspective.

Blellow Posted at 5-30 18:38
Osmo Action is more suitable for this active setup.

Why, does it have software stabilization?

Hi, GRandyB. Thanks for reaching out! Unfortunately, the DJI Pocket 2 does not have stability in a vertical direction and while mounted to a moving vehicle/bike, the bumps and vibration could cause jittering in the video.

DJI Gamora Posted at 5-30 22:50
Hi, GRandyB. Thanks for reaching out! Unfortunately, the DJI Pocket 2 does not have stability in a vertical direction and while mounted to a moving vehicle/bike, the bumps and vibration could cause jittering in the video.

What a shame, thanks

GRandyB Posted at 5-31 04:43
What a shame, thanks

You're welcome and thanks for understanding.

Try looking here: https://forum.dji.com/forum.php? ... 942&pid=2499118 (also contains links to other “micro shaking” and/or “micro flickering” effects.

It may (or may not ;-) be a special case of a flaw already recognized by DJI here: https://forum.dji.com/forum.php? ... 09&pid=2409396. The whole thread is worth reading.

Regards