Sj5000+ Post Processing to Improve Video Quality

As a photographer, one thing I can't abide is a washed out sky. Much action cam footage you see shot using default settings has horrible blown out patches of cloud or strange colour casts to what should be blue sky. This is because the small sensor can't handle the high dynamic range in many scenes so defaults to, (hopefully), exposing the main subject correctly whilst the sky takes its chances. If you want to achieve good exposure for the whole scene then a technique to try is to set exposure to the maximum that doesn't blow out the sky then bring up mid tones and shadows in post processing. In the clips below the original clip was shot with exposure set to -1.0EV and AWB at ISO 100. As you can see the sky looks fine, detail visible in the clouds and realistic blue sky patches. Shadows and mids took too dark though, and in the second video the original clip has had a curves adjustment made to brighten mid tones and shadows, with a little tweaking of saturation and colour balance. Unfortunately pushing adjustment of the 8 bit video files too far will result in banding and/or excessive noise but I was very pleasantly surprised that the adjustments I made for this demonstration have not caused any such problems and the SJ5000+ video files are more robust than I gave them credit for.

 

 

 

You can watch these samples together with a bit of pausing to synchronise.

 

The compression Youtube uses degrades video quality terribly so a couple of full 720 video stills:

 

 

One downside of post production adjustments is the resulting slow down in rendering video on my low spec PC. Today's trial was the first action footage I've shot using the SJ5000+ . Pausing allows examination of individual frames and the image is sharp from edge to edge (I won't bang on about the excessive in camera sharpening). Colour is natural looking and there is enough headroom in files to make some adjustments to brightness without images falling apart. Even if the WiFi problems aren't solved I'm inclined to keep the camera. It would be great if SJCAM could add a camera setting to mimic GoPro's Protune setting for the benefit of those of us wanting to squeeze out the last drops of image quality. I would definitely buy again based on the quality of video which can be obtained.