DJI Mini 5 Pro Night Video – How to Shoot Footage in Low Light

The Mini 5 Pro is the most advanced DJI lightweight drone. In all the tests I have done for footage and photography, the results have always been astonishing, thanks to the larger CMOS sensor and other interesting new features

In this article, I will show how to get the best results for footage taken in low-light conditions

Other related articles you may find interesting:

Low Light

I often see tests of a camera’s low-light capabilities taken in urban settings at night. Even though night cityscapes can often be spectacular, they don’t say much about low-light capabilities, since shadows will always be black, regardless of the camera used

The best moment for low-light tests is the blue hour, more or less an hour after sunset, depending on the latitude, when artificial lights are already on, but there is still a hint of natural light. I prefer to have artificial lights alongside unlit areas containing vegetation or other elements. The shadows will be very dark, but can be recovered according to the capabilities of the camera used

When shooting footage or photos in low light, I suggest turning on the LED in the Safety tab of the Settings. It helps keeping track of the aircraft and facilitates the Return to Home

Manual Exposure

When shooting footage, I always use Manual Exposure; however, with the Mini 5 Pro, in low light, it may be worth using Auto or Semi-auto exposure, as we will see later on

The main advantage of manual exposure is that we can individually control the ISO and Shutter Speed values. Following the 180-degree rule, the recommended shutter speed is 1/50 s at 25 fps and 1/60 s at 30 fps. In low-light situations, you can reduce the shutter speed to 1/25 s or 1/30 s to gain approximately one additional stop of light

For ISO, we try to use the lowest values to avoid noise and other artifacts

Let’s start with ISO 100 and SS at 1/50”. As you can see, the footage is underexposed by a couple of stops. We can improve it while editing, but we can do better with different exposure values

Now we bring the SS to 1/25”, maintaining the ISO at 100, thus adding an extra stop of exposure. It is an improvement over the previous one, but the clip is still underexposed. We need to raise the ISO

Let’s now try ISO 400 and ISO 800 with a shutter speed of 1/50”. In both cases, the Mini 5 Pro handles the higher values very well. There is no hint of noise or other artifact; the colors are rich with a good dose of contrast.

During the blue hour, the luminosity decreases quickly. In most cases, we can optimize the exposure with an ISO value between 200 and 800 and a shutter speed of 1/50” or 1/25”

Dual Native ISO

When using auto or semi-auto exposure, according to DJI, the Mini 5 Pro records footage at two different exposure values and blends them to achieve up to 14 stops of dynamic range, which is especially useful in high-dynamic-range and low-light situations. It works similarly to HDR photos, with highlights taken from the lowest exposure and shadows from the highest

Beginners can simply set the exposure to Auto to benefit from this feature; however, there is a better method that allows us to control the SS value. We can select Manual exposure, and then, in the exposure window, tap the ISO icon. We can now specify the desired SS value, while the program will compute the optimal ISO value

This method is very simple to use and delivers excellent results, maintaining plenty of detail in the shadows. The only downside is that some annoying shifts in brightness may appear when the light intensity varies. For this reason, it is suggested to maintain the same flight direction during each move and avoid tilting the gimbal

Color Profiles

So far I have only shown footage taken in Normal mode and I find the results excellent. So, what is the point of using other color profiles?

The advantage of D Log M is that it contains more information and responds very well to color grading. It is the one to use to adapt a clip of the color scheme of a project, or to summon a specific mood. A good dose of post processing is needed, so it is aimed at advanced users

In most situations I don’t suggest using HLG, as it requires a complex post production with a specific color space. However, in low light it can at times produce excellent results even with very little editing. It is often worth trying it

Med Tele Mode

Another major feature of the Mini 5 Pro is the 48mm Med Tele Mode, offering a 2x zoom with better quality than the digital zoom of previous models

Using this mode, we can get closer to targets that cannot otherwise be reached, increase the parallax effect when several layers are present in an image, and obtain better separation between a target and the background

As you can see, the results obtained in low light are superior to zooming digitally. Sadly, the Med Tele mode can only be used with a frame rate of 30 fps. Since I encode all my footage in 24 fps, the Med Tele mode will show some stuttering. I hope a choice of frame rates will be added by a firmware update