Some colourful fireworks over the sea, recorded from the beach:
Settings were default except for:
Resolution: 2160, 4:3 (For extra vertical FOV)
Loop Recording: 10 minutes (To avoid any glitches between files)
Audio Level: High (Fireworks should be noisy!)
Date Stamp: Off
EV: -1/3 (Don't think it made any difference since I manually set the exposure)
Shutter Speed: 1/60 Sec (Fairly fast to avoid motion blue since the fireworks can move fast and I might want to take some still images from the video.)
ISO: 200 (Avoiding over exposure since I wanted to keep the colour.)
Colour: Vivid (I like colourful fireworks.)
Contrast: Low (Because it was already set that way.)
Gyro: Off (It was on a tripod, plus I wanted a large FOV.)
Sharpness: Soft (Didn't need artificial sharpening since it was recorded at 2160 resolution and I only want 1080.)
Video Bitrate: High (for high quality)
Metering: Average (Don't think it made any difference since I manually set the exposure)
Then I processed it using ffmpeg using the following options:
-itsoffset 0.48 (To remove most of the audio delay due to distance and the speed of sound)
crop=w=2880:h=1620:x=760:y=0 (Digital zoom selecting the part of the FOV that I want. I didn't know beforehand how high the fireworks would go so had to record from further away than ideal for the lens to make sure I got everything, plus there was water at the right distance!)
scale=1920:1080 (That's the resolution of the video I want to produce.)
gamma=1.6 (Brighten the darker areas.)
saturation=2.9 (Extra vivid
)
unsharp=3:3:1.2:7:7:0 (Just a little sharpening of the 1080 resolution video.)
-ss 301 -to 561 (Only the interesting part of the video.)
-crf 18 (High quality output.)
ffmpeg -i fireworks.mp4 -itsoffset 0.48 -i fireworks.mp4 -vf "crop=w=2880:h=1620:x=760:y=0, scale=1920:1080, setpts=1*PTS, eq=gamma=1.6:saturation=2.9, unsharp=3:3:1.2:7:7:0" -c:v libx264 -map 0:1 -map 1:0 -preset veryslow -ss 301 -to 561 -crf 18 fireworks_18.mp4