Get the CINEMATIC look on your GoPro with ND Filters

The very first thing you need in order to get that cinematic and more real feel look on your GoPro/DJI Osmo Action footage is ND Filters.

The Neutral Density filter stops light reaching the camera sensor by a specific number of stops. Think of it like sunglasses for your lens.

On this video you are going to see the results of the footage shot with the GoPro Hero 7 Black and the FREEWELL Nd Filters pack, which by the way the guys from Freewell were kind enough to send me for review.

What is a ND filter?

By using ND filter you have the ability to bring your shutter speed down. To have the cinematic look on your footage with any camera you need to have your shutter speed double that of your frame rate, in order to have this normal motion blur in your footage.

This is a standard that was set years ago when people were shooting on film and basically they had a shutter angle instead of shutter speed. The standard cinema film is 180 degrees shutter angle. Half-open half-closed.

So to get that same effect with cameras nowdays you use shutter speed instead of shutter angle. When you have a shutter speed that is low like 1/50 of second its gonna let a lot more light in, than say you have 1/1000 of a second. So if you have let’s say 25 frames per second you will need a shutter speed of 1/50 of a second to get twice the speed of your frame rate.

And in order to get that shutter speed you will need a ND filter to avoid over exposed footage, especially with cameras that have fixed apertures, like action cameras, drones, e.t.c.

The Freewell nd filter pack comes with 4 ND Filters, the ND4 (2 stop neutral density) ND8 (3 stop for partly cloudy days), ND16 (4-stop for bright days) and ND32 (5-stop for extremely bright conditions). They are compatible with Gopro hero 5, 6, 7 AND 8 they are easy to snap on without using a case or removing the lens.

Let’s go now and see examples of the GoPro footage with the different filters and without so you can see by yourself the results.

I have been using ND Filters for many years and for many different shooting situations. I love how they make my videos and pictures look, the real feel they give and I definitely recommend them when you want to get that cinematic look on your footage. And with the FREEWELL nd filter pack you can’t go wrong when it comes to the quality and the price of these filters.

Here is the link to get the FREEWELL ND filters pack if you are interested to get yours: https://geni.us/freewellgopro and remember that this is an affiliate link which means a small percentage will go to support this channel without costing anything extra to you.

Emilio Takas
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