Manual Exposure Test on Yuneec Typhoon H Drone CGO3+ 4K Camera

JD usually runs his Yuneec Typhoon H hexacopter's CGO3+ 4K video camera in auto-exposure and auto-white balance mode. It usually produces decent video, especially in the daytime. He'll switch to manual exposure at night.Show more

This flight, he used manual exposure following the "Sunny 16" rule and setting ISO to 100. With the fixed f/2.8 lens opening, that meant setting shutter speed to around 1/3200s. (ideally, it would be bertter to use a neutral density filter on the lens to stop it down so that a shutter speed of 1/60s could be used, but JD has none for the CGO3+) He left auto white balance on.

The resulting exposure seems decent and rock solid on this bright sunny day a few days after Hurricane Ida passed close by. Along the way, he tested the RealSense® obstruction avoidance, letting the drone navigate itself around trees. The only negative for this flight was that just as he switched the camera's pan mode to global so he could look sideways while the drone flew eastward, shifting its nose to the direction of travel and ensuring the obstacle sensors were always looking in the travel direction, the FPV video dropped out. The altitude was low and the neighborhood is packed with WiFi that can jam the drone's video signal. At 250-350 feet in the same neighborhood, it usually gets much better range.

So JD hit the return to home switch and waited for the aircraft to return to the controller location and land itself. The 4K video here is recorded on an SD card in the drone, unaffected by WiFi interference. This is unedited footage straight from the camera with no re-rendering (except by Rumble's video encoder, of course).