Does the Mavic 2 Pro have digital zoom?

[CJG]

I hope it is not a stupid question, but where is the digital zoom on the Mavic 2 Pro? Or doesn’t this exist any more?

I had my 5d controller button set to zoom in on my original Mavic Pro, but that option seems to have vanished.

And “pinching” the screen doesn’t seem to work.

 

[CanadaDrone]

Sort of.

Not a stupid question, the answer takes some explaining.

When shooting video, simply using the "HQ" mode gives you the equivalent of 40mm/55 degrees FOV (up from 28mm/77 degrees FOV), with no quality loss. You actually get an increase in quality by using HQ mode because the drone uses a 1:1 pixel area for 4K in that mode rather than subsampling from the full sensor area. It's easy to toggle between these in the DJI app. This is the exact same basic principle as using an APS-C ("crop") sensor vs a Full Frame sensor if you are familiar with DSLRs.

Also when shooting video, if you are OK with a 1080P (or lower) output resolution, simply shooting in 4K allows you to zoom losslessly up to ~200% or more in post processing. This is not unique to the M2P, you can do this with any 4K video footage and is often advertised as "lossless digital zoom", with the caveat that your output resolution will be lower. It's basically just cropping the image.

To my knowledge you can't do any digital zooming while recording, but there are ways to "zoom" with the M2P, described above. It's not really something you would want to do anyway if you are shooting in 4K because any digital zooming would mean you are no longer shooting 4K.

 

[CJG]

A really helpful answer: thanks for your help. I am more of a still photographer than video (as I have never been able to get my head around how to edit videos!) but your answer makes complete sense

 

[CanadaDrone]

A really helpful answer: thanks for your help. I am more of a still photographer than video (as I have never been able to get my head around how to edit videos!) but your answer makes complete sense

Happy to help.

If you have a recent iPad or iPad Pro, look into the LumaFusion app. It gives you professional-level video editing tools with a very simple interface (drag & drop, etc.) That's where I learned to edit video. Beyond dragging clips onto a timeline, it's pretty well the same as editing a photo.

 

[CJG]

Thanks for this. I have heard someone else praise this: I will have a look!

 

[crlmjohnson]

A really helpful answer: thanks for your help. I am more of a still photographer than video (as I have never been able to get my head around how to edit videos!) but your answer makes complete sense

I think editing videos are fun and easy, once you decide on the editing software that you want to use, and learn it.

 

[paulatkin73]

Sort of.

Not a stupid question, the answer takes some explaining.

When shooting video, simply using the "HQ" mode gives you the equivalent of 40mm/55 degrees FOV (up from 28mm/77 degrees FOV), with no quality loss. You actually get an increase in quality by using HQ mode because the drone uses a 1:1 pixel area for 4K in that mode rather than subsampling from the full sensor area. It's easy to toggle between these in the DJI app. This is the exact same basic principle as using an APS-C ("crop") sensor vs a Full Frame sensor if you are familiar with DSLRs.

Also when shooting video, if you are OK with a 1080P (or lower) output resolution, simply shooting in 4K allows you to zoom losslessly up to ~200% or more in post processing. This is not unique to the M2P, you can do this with any 4K video footage and is often advertised as "lossless digital zoom", with the caveat that your output resolution will be lower. It's basically just cropping the image.

To my knowledge you can't do any digital zooming while recording, but there are ways to "zoom" with the M2P, described above. It's not really something you would want to do anyway if you are shooting in 4K because any digital zooming would mean you are no longer shooting 4K.

just to augment this -

 

[DJE-2021]

thanks I just had the same question