Does Mavic Shoot Video or Watercolor Paintings? Don’t settle. Get Involved!

[Realist123456]

Still more testing to get this watercolour thing pinned down. Here's my latest that I'm pretty happy with. Note that this is for my Mavic. Your mileage may vary but I thought I'd put it out there for people who are still having issues. Settings for good results are as follows:
Ignore any advice to set your sharpness at a negative number.
If you are flying in low light (e.g. just before dawn and/or with soft light, keep sharpness at +1 or +2, depending on how fine detail there is in your shot. If you have just buildings or roads etc then you may get away with "0". But if you have fine leaves or grass anything below 1 or 2 will result in at least some patches of mush.
Once the sun rises you can go back to "0".
D-Cinelike for colour and there you go.
Done.

 

[BorisTheSpider]

^
This accords entirely with my experience so far, having listened prior to actually flying the drone to everyone talking about flattening out the profile and reducing the sharpening, this is not realistic on such a small sensor. Cinelike and 0/0/0 is working fine for me - I don't usually film in low light, but if I did I'd try positive sharpening as although it might be kind of nasty and oversharpened, it's the best you can expect in low light with a sensor the size of a gnats %£#@. In decent light, the results are very pleasing and more than up to par for the size and cost if you don't try and make it do things it can't.

 

[Realist123456]

I agree. And even if you go too far with the sharpening you can always pull it back with Neatvideo or similar.
Better to do that than get an irretrievable mess by going negative sharpening on the Mavic.

 

[Dale Rodgers]

 

[razors]

I have been doing testing over past few days on high detail areas like pine trees and also find +1 on sharpening works well.

 

[MavicNewb]

hey guys, im not sure if this is the right thread for this but reading around and trying what people have suggested. I did +1 on the sharpness for video and it solved my soft spots in the videos. Taking a picture the right side of the pictures are a bit soft. Im trying to figure out if its just me not focusing correctly or theres a camera defect. Any help would be great.

Below is a picture taken with RAW format


Below is a video snap shot of a 4k 24fps video with +1 sharpening.

 

[Kingkong]

Still more testing to get this watercolour thing pinned down. Here's my latest that I'm pretty happy with. Note that this is for my Mavic. Your mileage may vary but I thought I'd put it out there for people who are still having issues. Settings for good results are as follows:
Ignore any advice to set your sharpness at a negative number.
If you are flying in low light (e.g. just before dawn and/or with soft light, keep sharpness at +1 or +2, depending on how fine detail there is in your shot. If you have just buildings or roads etc then you may get away with "0". But if you have fine leaves or grass anything below 1 or 2 will result in at least some patches of mush.
Once the sun rises you can go back to "0".
D-Cinelike for colour and there you go.
Done.

this might be the most useful post in this thread

seems like dji knew this, which is by by default they have the styles
standard which is at 0,0,0
and landscape at +1,+1,0

and soft (ie water colour lol) is -1,0,0

i made the mistake of following a youtube video "guru" and used -3 for sharpness and ended up with unusable watercolour video

 

[Realist123456]

this might be the most useful post in this thread

seems like dji knew this, which is by by default they have the styles
standard which is at 0,0,0
and landscape at +1,+1,0

and soft (ie water colour lol) is -1,0,0

i made the mistake of following a youtube video "guru" and used -3 for sharpness and ended up with unusable watercolour video

Glad I could help.
I did some final testing this morning before sunup.
I'm sold on the idea of + sharpening.
I locked the mavic on a scene and did run-ups from -3 to +3. Mush at -3 stays mush until you get to 0 or +1. Then it's fine with virtually no watercolour.
One it hits +1 I can't see any discernible difference in 4K between +1 and +3.
I think for most things I'll go with +1 and for low light, pre dawn etc I'll go +3 just to be safe.
I think you could leave it at +3 and still be ok but to be safe once the sun comes up just go down to +1 or even 0 if there's not too much fine detail in the shot.
Even if you get too sharp results just knock it back a bit in post.

 

[fishelectronics]

Glad I could help.
I did some final testing this morning before sunup.
I'm sold on the idea of + sharpening.
I locked the mavic on a scene and did run-ups from -3 to +3. Mush at -3 stays mush until you get to 0 or +1. Then it's fine with virtually no watercolour.
One it hits +1 I can't see any discernible difference in 4K between +1 and +3.
I think for most things I'll go with +1 and for low light, pre dawn etc I'll go +3 just to be safe.
I think you could leave it at +3 and still be ok but to be safe once the sun comes up just go down to +1 or even 0 if there's not too much fine detail in the shot.
Even if you get too sharp results just knock it back a bit in post.

Tested few days ago different sharpness and come to the same conclusion, except +3 - I didn't go so far. I think after 48 pages of this thread we over with settings and the main question now is: "What replacement DJI do on RMA for people who return their babies and then happy with the new results". Or maybe: "Is that still hardware or software issue?". What I really want is to get best video without post processing, means not oversharped, not blurred...

 

[stratos]

So I started flying with the config as +1 -1 0 and the video is quite clear. Going -1 or -2 in sharpness introduces so many unnecessary artifacts. I don't understand why many "pros" ask people to use -1 -2 it just make your vids look horrible

 

[edu2ev]

In one of my first flights I forgot to set the resolution and it was set to 1080 at 48fps. When I saw it, I thought my camera was broken because there were no details at all. It was like some part of the game "Tales of Borderland".
I think it's due to some crappy compression DJI use for high frame rates. At 4k 24fps the image is back ok with details.

 

[AyeYo]

hey guys, im not sure if this is the right thread for this but reading around and trying what people have suggested. I did +1 on the sharpness for video and it solved my soft spots in the videos. Taking a picture the right side of the pictures are a bit soft. Im trying to figure out if its just me not focusing correctly or theres a camera defect. Any help would be great.

Below is a picture taken with RAW format
View attachment 10822

Below is a video snap shot of a 4k 24fps video with +1 sharpening.
View attachment 10823

That's a hardware issue and known manufacturing defect. If you have a picture that's consistently out of focus to one side, you have a poorly installed lense/sensor and need to RMA.

 

[AyeYo]

Glad I could help.
I did some final testing this morning before sunup.
I'm sold on the idea of + sharpening.
I locked the mavic on a scene and did run-ups from -3 to +3. Mush at -3 stays mush until you get to 0 or +1. Then it's fine with virtually no watercolour.
One it hits +1 I can't see any discernible difference in 4K between +1 and +3.
I think for most things I'll go with +1 and for low light, pre dawn etc I'll go +3 just to be safe.
I think you could leave it at +3 and still be ok but to be safe once the sun comes up just go down to +1 or even 0 if there's not too much fine detail in the shot.
Even if you get too sharp results just knock it back a bit in post.

How does +3 affect the noisy levels? Can you give us some full res cropped +3 examples?

 

[AyeYo]

"What replacement DJI do on RMA for people who return their babies and then happy with the new results"

It's nothing but placebo effect when they get their Mavic back and suddenly love the exact same photos and videos they had before. There is a legitimate out of focus issue, but given the example pictures posted in this thread, only a very small number of people have it.

 

[MavicNewb]

That's a hardware issue and known manufacturing defect. If you have a picture that's consistently out of focus to one side, you have a poorly installed lense/sensor and need to RMA.

So looking at the pictures I took, is this as good as I'm gonna get with the mavic? I'd hate to RMA it and get something that could possibly be worse as some people have said after 2-3 RMA'd mavic a that they still have the problem. It doesn't always seem out of focus, if it is then it's very little compared to what other people have, but not sure if it's worth to RMA now or wait until end of summer to send it in and hopefully by then they have a grip on the lens issue

 

[AyeYo]

So looking at the pictures I took, is this as good as I'm gonna get with the mavic? I'd hate to RMA it and get something that could possibly be worse as some people have said after 2-3 RMA'd mavic a that they still have the problem. It doesn't always seem out of focus, if it is then it's very little compared to what other people have, but not sure if it's worth to RMA now or wait until end of summer to send it in and hopefully by then they have a grip on the lens issue

Other people don't have focus issues, they just refuse to use proper settings. What you have IS a known issue that can be corrected. I guess it comes down to personal preference and what you plan to do with the photos. Unless you're printing large photos, I don't think anyone is going to notice that slight bit of a softness when viewing the picture or video at 1080p on a screen. As for getting a Mavic that's worse, that's not likely. What this thread has proved is that there aren't "good and bad" quality Mavic cameras as was originally believed. There are only people that do and do not know how to use the Mavic properly.

 

[MavicNewb]

Other people don't have focus issues, they just refuse to use proper settings. What you have IS a known issue that can be corrected. I guess it comes down to personal preference and what you plan to do with the photos. Unless you're printing large photos, I don't think anyone is going to notice that slight bit of a softness when viewing the picture or video at 1080p on a screen. As for getting a Mavic that's worse, that's not likely. What this thread has proved is that there aren't "good and bad" quality Mavic cameras as was originally believed. There are only people that do and do not know how to use the Mavic properly.

Thanks, in planning on going back to the DJI store today to exchange it for a brand new drone after they do some in store evaluation to make sure what's I'm saying is true. Hopefully the new drone won't have the same issue

 

[Realist123456]

How does +3 affect the noisy levels? Can you give us some full res cropped +3 examples?

Here are some example crops.
-3 looks mushy and stayed like that until it got to zero.
-3, -2 and -1 were pretty much crap.
Zero was ok but +1 looked better.
From +1 to +3 it looked pretty much the same as far as I could tell.

 

[AyeYo]

I realize your crops aren't spot-on the same size, but did you notice that +3 was almost double the file size of -3 in spite of only being slightly larger in dimensions? What's the difference in full frame file size? That alone looks to be pretty telling.

 

[omega_vfx]

So, sharpness +1 is the consensus on that so far. What about 2.7k vs 4k? D-log vs D-cinelike? For the latter, I have a feeling that D-log is just compressing the values from 0-255 to 40-210... which is absolutely useless and even contraproductive.

Jesus, why can't DJI just put useful settings as the standard - they should have all this figured out already!