Good Morning folks,

I've been doing some prep work for a Job I have coming up in a month or so, that will involve some night flying.  I need to get some footage and stills of a town at night.  Whilst it is pretty well lit by street lights, it does have dark patches.  I've noticed from doing some test flights with the X5 gimbal and DJI lens, that getting a good focus is a little bit tricky in flight.  I'm using a S2 tablet as a display, but it is difficult to see how accurate the focus is on there.

Does anyone have any tips for increasing the likelihood of getting a decent focus at night?

One thing I was wondering about, is switching the lens to Manual focus, and setting it on the ground, thus making sure that it can't accidentally be changed in the air?

Cheers
Andy

You might experiment with focus peaking in the GO App to show you where the lens is focused.
Focus peaking is the electronic display which highlights the areas of sharpest focus in an image with a red false-color halo.

I would recommend setting the focus to manual. It would be best to focus in the air, where you can better calibrate using a farther subject. Daroga brings up a great point with focus peaking as well.

I'll try that thanks.  Not sure how it will cope with the darker scenes, but if it helps, that is a good think!

Andy

Andy Sayle Posted at 2016-11-2 05:18
I'll try that thanks.  Not sure how it will cope with the darker scenes, but if it helps, that is a  ...

Theres also a few members in the Inspire section of the forum that posted a few of their X5 night shots with some camera settings, you can see if those help some as well. Getting the exposure down can help some with the clarity of gauging focus.

Daroga Posted at 2016-11-2 02:37
You might experiment with focus peaking in the GO App to show you where the lens is focused.
Focus  ...

There are percentage options on the peak focusing, I just chose 90%

What are the differences ?

SRQ Aerial Posted at 2016-12-4 17:47
There are percentage options on the peak focusing, I just chose 90%

What are the differences ?

SRQ Aerial,
    A couple of generic photography articles explain what peak filtering is:

Click here for B&H Photo article
Click here for Luminous-Landscape article

With our Inspire/GoApp, peak focus can be set to None/90%/80%/70%....

Naturally, None turns it off.

90% sets the microcontrast/focus highlight to the smallest red halo/line. For most daylight scenarious, 90% is great to determine fine focus.

80% enlarges the microcontrast/focus area, making the red halo/focus highlight larger. As lighting decreases, you may find 80% helpful in identifying optimum focus.

70% sets the max microcontrast/ focus area highlight. It might be helpful to identify the broadest of focus areas and check depth of field inclusion.

Good luck, and always fly safely!

Manual focusing set to infinity then all should be fine. Otherwise you'll probably find the auto focus hunting around.