DJI Mavic, Air and Mini Drones
Friendly, Helpful & Knowledgeable Community
Join Us Now

2.7 or 4k?

Ziggy01

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2017
Messages
416
Reactions
308
Age
62
Seems that there's some controversy over which of these produces the "best" and cleanest footage.

I've gone from 4k to 2.7 and feel that I'm achieving a more "cinematic" look to my shots.

What are you shooting and why?
 
2.7k as it seems to be common wisdom. Smaller file size too. To be honest if the 1080p was useable I'd use that.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Chadnovz
Seems that there's some controversy over which of these produces the "best" and cleanest footage.

I've gone from 4k to 2.7 and feel that I'm achieving a more "cinematic" look to my shots.

What are you shooting and why?

I use 2.7 because with this resolution is possibile zoom 2X.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Chadnovz
I'm just seeing 4K as a negative on both counts: larger files and lesser quality.
 
I find the footage is smoother in 2.7K. Any panning in 4K looks very jumpy to me.
 
With my gopro I use 2k and mostly 2k 4:3 (FPS). But with Mavic I'm always using 4k. Then I create some Premiere proxies to edit my files in 1080.
Funny thing, gopro creates larger files, is it because of the sound recorded? I don't notice difference in video quality. Well I must confess, I usually use the start/stop recording, while with gopro I don't, and with gopro the videos are longer, so I guess my comparison so far is not that
accurate.

Regarding the zoom feature, in post production with 4K you can achieve better zoom without losing quality (with any fps setting)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mashuugana
I took my Mavic out this weekend for the first time in a while and as per the advise here upped the sharpness to +1. I found the footage to be very crunchy and over sharpened to my liking.

This morning I've been playing around with different settings and changing the sharpness to 0 at 4K starts to display the watercolour effect. Moving to 2K was a lot more natural looking with very little compression artifact but I felt was a little soft. Leaving it at 2K, I pushed the sharpness back to +1 and am much happier. No watercolour effect and the +1 sharpness looks pretty good on 2K. Nowhere near as over sharpened as it was on 4K.

I think I've finally settled on my settings of D-Cinelike, +1,0,0, 2k 30fps
 
I took my Mavic out this weekend for the first time in a while and as per the advise here upped the sharpness to +1. I found the footage to be very crunchy and over sharpened to my liking.

This morning I've been playing around with different settings and changing the sharpness to 0 at 4K starts to display the watercolour effect. Moving to 2K was a lot more natural looking with very little compression artifact but I felt was a little soft. Leaving it at 2K, I pushed the sharpness back to +1 and am much happier. No watercolour effect and the +1 sharpness looks pretty good on 2K. Nowhere near as over sharpened as it was on 4K.

I think I've finally settled on my settings of D-Cinelike, +1,0,0, 2k 30fps
That's the conventional wisdom.
 
Personally I think that all of these discussions are fruitless and boil down to almost nothing other than opinion unless they are accompanied with relevant samples. i.e. "I like 2k over 4k and here is the footage that I am seeing"
Ziggy01 and I have been in a another forum where the virtues of -1,0,0 / 0,0,0, and +1,0,0 was being discussed. By the way I engourge you all to visit it and jump in. Here is the link: Is there actually an answer to the camera settings question?

Anyway as you can imagine there were as many opinions as there are possible combinations. Why is that? Heres what I think. I am getting the sneaking suspicion that the reason why there are such vast discrepancies in settings is not personal taste, but a quality control issue at DJI that is making each Mavic and sensor placement just different enough that we are all picking the settings (corrections) that work for our personal unit and shooting conditions. And to put my samples where my mouth is, below is a link to a video clip (with as little compression as practical). In this particular link we were judging images captured at 3840x2160 and 2720x1530 all shot in D-Cinelike at 100 ISO 24fps at a 50th and at the various sharpness settings. What I would like to know is if after looking at these ungraded images and associated settings if any of it looks familiar to everybody or if you are getting totally different results from the same settings. Also because this thread was started to speak only to the 2k vs 4k, below is also a link to the same stuff just limited to only a side by side comparison of the identical scene shot at 2k and 4k. In this particular case I standardized on the +1,0,0 because that's what seems to look best on my bird. In my opinion there is little difference and further would give it to the 4k sample (in my test). Lastly I understand the common sense associated with the smaller image and the better quality you should get at the same data rate, but remember that cameras are built to a "native" performance setting and then all the other settings up and down are created afterwords for consumer choice. But sometimes they simply aren't as good. Lets face it if 2k really looked better than 4k based on less compression, that logic would tell us that 1920x1080 would be even better. And, as virtually every post I read says that 1920 x 1080 is generally an unusable setting, I would submit that there might be more there than the conventional data rate theory.

I would love to here everyones thoughts and more importantly PLEASE submit samples for us all to see and compare.

Thanks,
rb

Sharpness settings link;
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
PW: mavic

Just 2k vs 4k link of same footage:
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
PW: mavic
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: alexanderguelph
Personally I think that all of these discussions are fruitless and boil down to almost nothing other than opinion unless they are accompanied with relevant samples. i.e. "I like 2k over 4k and here is the footage that I am seeing"
Ziggy01 and I have been in a another forum where the virtues of -1,0,0 / 0,0,0, and +1,0,0 was being discussed. By the way I engourge you all to visit it and jump in. Here is the link: Is there actually an answer to the camera settings question?

Anyway as you can imagine there were as many opinions as there are possible combinations. Why is that? Heres what I think. I am getting the sneaking suspicion that the reason why there are such vast discrepancies in settings is not personal taste, but a quality control issue at DJI that is making each Mavic and sensor placement just different enough that we are all picking the settings (corrections) that work for our personal unit and shooting conditions. And to put my samples where my mouth is, below is a link to a video clip (with as little compression as practical). In this particular link we were judging images captured at 3840x2160 and 2720x1530 all shot in D-Cinelike at 100 ISO 24fps at a 50th and at the various sharpness settings. What I would like to know is if after looking at these ungraded images and associated settings if any of it looks familiar to everybody or if you are getting totally different results from the same settings. Also because the thread was started to speak only to the 2k vs 4k, here is a link to the same stuff just limited to only a side by side comparison of the identical scene shot at 2k and 4k. In this particular case I standardized on the +1,0,0 because that's what seems to look best on my bird. In my opinion there is little difference and further would give it to the 4k sample. Lastly I understand the common sense associated with the smaller image and the better quality you should get at the same data rate, but remember that cameras are built to a "native" performance setting and then all the other settings up and down are created afterwords for consumer choice. But sometimes they simply aren't as good. Lets face it if 2k really looked better than 4k based on less compression, that logic would tell us that 1920x1080 would be even better. And, as virtually every post I read says that 1920 x 1080 is generally an unusable setting, I would submit that there might be more there than the conventional data rate theory.

I would love to here everyones thought and more importantly PLEASE submit samples for us all to see and compare.

Thanks,
rb

Sharpness settings link;
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
PW: mavic

Just 2k vs 4k link of same footage:
To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
PW: mavic

Videos don't work, they are asking for a password to watch them.
 
if you look below I posted the PW. It is "mavic" for both. Thanks for watching!

rb
 

DJI Drone Deals

New Threads

Forum statistics

Threads
134,499
Messages
1,595,655
Members
163,022
Latest member
Freakazoid
Want to Remove this Ad? Simply login or create a free account