Best Caddx Turtle settings

The Caddx Turtle V2 is a very popular micro HD, FPV camera. Most of the cine whoops like the Cinebee, Mobula7 HD or the Bushido are equipped with this camera.

Unfortunately the default settings are in my opinion not the best. Luckily you can change quit a bit when you have the control board for the Caddx Turtle. Not all of the models do include this control board. And before you get tempted: the Runcam control boards will unfortunately not work.

If your model did not come with a control board you can pick it up in a package with some other spare parts for a couple of bucks from banggood.

The main settings menu can be accessed by long pressing the joystick on the control board, from there you navigate to the sub menus by pushing up and down and confirm by pressing the joystick. Options may be changed by pushing the joystick left or right.

Do not forget to Save and Exit from the main menu or sub menus in order to actually save your new settings.

Auto recording

Auto recording enables the Caddx Turtle to automatically start recording as soon as it is powered up. This ensures that you will no longer forget to start the recording - no more pressing the button. I don’t quite understand why this is not the default setting anyways.

You can enable it by setting Auto recording to On in the Video sub menu:

Main Menu -> Video -> Auto recording: On

Quality and frame-rate

I would recommend you record in 1080p with 60 FPS (Frames Per Second). 60 FPS allows for some cool slow-mo in post production. You can set the resolution and frame-rate in the Video sub menu. If you want to save space on your SD card and are not intending on using slow motion is post, you can also set this to 30 FPS (1080P30Fps).

I would not recommend to go to 720P, although it allows you to record with 120 FPS, but you are sacrificing quite some video quality for this higher frame rate.

Main Menu -> Video -> 1080P60Fps

OSD

In case you are using the Caddx Turtle V2 on a quadcopter with a somewhat newer flight controller, chances are that you will already have an OSD, so I would recommend to simply disable all OSD related functionality on the Caddx Turtle.

You can to this from the OSD settings sub menu:

Main Menu -> OSD Settings

From here set Voltage and Time to Off. Leave name empty and hit Save and Exit this will remove the default Caddx.us name tag.

Video Settings

This is where it gets pretty subjective, but the settings I like best are the following:

  • Saturation: 2
  • Sharpness: 2
  • Contrast: 5
  • Brightness: 5

Each of the settings can have a value between 1 and 5.

Saturation, contrast and brightness should be pretty self explanatory, sharpness maybe not so much.

Sharpness a technique to increase edge contrast the so called acutance of on image. But there are certain problems with sharpness, for example shadows often have noise in them, by sharpening it you draw attention to this noise. A similar effect happens with highlights. Sharpening can also introduce additional, unwanted saturation. If you really want more sharpness you can always add it in post.

All of this can be set in within the Image effect sub menu:

Main menu -> Image effect

I would highly encourage you to play around with those settings on your own, this is what works best for me and my editing workflow.

Pro tip:

Think of a short track and fly the same track with different video settings and compare the results afterwards side by side. Make sure you can get as many different light situations and transitions from dark to bright as you can.

Some settings work really well for bright environments, some for low light environments. I prefer to have one setting that works equally good in most of the situations, then I can simply set that and forget about it, the imperfections I can later on fix in post.

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ND Filters

While technically not being a setting, I can not highly enough recommend the ND filters for the Caddx Turtle. They come in different strengths (ND8 and ND16) and are a must have if you want to prevent jello in your footage especially in bright day light.

Additionally they are also a great way to protect your lens in a crash - it is easier to simply swap the rather inexpensive ND filter than to swap the lens, focus is and risk getting dust into the system.

Cleaning the sensor from dust

Again, this is not a setting but I think this is a good place to mention it. Maybe I have just bad luck, but every Caddx Turtle (actually every Caddx camera) I have ever owned came with dust inside of it. The dust will show as dark spots in the footage as you can see in the screen grab. This comes from the dust setting on the chip.

What you can do to fix this is get a dust cleaner pump for cleaning camera sensors. Screw off the lens and blow out the sensor. If you want to do it ultra low budget you can also try to blow it out by mouth, maybe blow through a tissue just to make sure that you do not accidentally spit on your sensor.

I would recommend doing this in a place that is rather dust free, so preferably not your favorite bando.

I like to do this in the bathroom, let the shower run with hot water to get the steam going for a couple of minutes, this will bind the dust particles in the air and you have a good time window to blow your sensor out without actually risking to introduce even more into the system.

Chris is a Vienna based software developer. In his spare time he enjoys reviewing tech gear, ripping quads of all sizes and making stuff.

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