Mavic 2 Pro 4K FOV and 4K HQ - any improvements in quality since the release?

[dawaske]

Hello everyone!
After flying a Mavic Pro (1) for more than two years now I'm tempted to upgrade to the Mavic 2. Especially the Mavic 2 Pro seems like the perfect replacement at first glance. However, after some research I'm not so sure about that anymore; things like the barrel distortion when shooting videos in DLog-M, still only 4K30 and - most importantly - the bad 4K FOV and 4K HQ video quality compared to the Mavic 2 Zoom and especially the Phantom 4 make me wonder whether the Mavic 2 Pro would be a sensible investment after all.
On the other hand, there have been 4 firmware updates after this video was made, so I'm curious:

Has the quality of 4K FOV and 4K HQ videos improved by now?

Cheers,
Daniel

 

[Jason_sturgess]

You don't need to be shooting in D log mode to get the 10 Bit mode you get it in Normal mode and HQ! Here is a recent Video I did of the Flying Scotsman in HQ Mode Normal ,

Anyone who owns a Mavic 2 Pro and has used it for a good 6 months will all tell you how amazing it it!

Don't read to much in to the reviews about the barrel distortion as its easily corrected ! The mavic 2 Pro is hands down the best Drone on the market for Photographers.

Not sure what Videos you have been watching but the Quality from Mavic 2 pro is Better than the Zoom and the P4P ! The P4P maybe slightly better at night time shots.

You need to take in to account that a lot of Videos posted online are not uploaded at there max Bit RATE ! So the Quality will very depending on how the person has Rendered the File.
The above Video of the Scotsman is Filmed in 4K with 60 Bit Rate so not even at its max and it looks stunning in 4k. It even takes amazing photos , look at my Instagram and see the quality that comes out of it.

 

[parkgt]

You don't need to be shooting in D log mode to get the 10 Bit mode you get it in Normal mode and HQ!

[/QUOTE

I will have to try that again. Last time my Normal was only 8 bit.

 

[Jason_sturgess]

Make sure you select H.265 Format to get 10 Bit mode to work

 

[dawaske]

Not sure what Videos you have been watching but the Quality from Mavic 2 pro is Better than the Zoom and the P4P ! The P4P maybe slightly better at night time shots.

I watched several videos about the sharpness issue, such as

 

[WithTheBirds]

The quality was good when it was released and still is.

Farting around shooting test charts (often without understanding how to do that properly) and pixel peeping are different things to real world use and producing nice video.

 

[Dakrisht]

Mavic 2 Pro does *not* shoot in 10-bit color mode under Normal regardless of what compression codec (H264 or HEVC H265) you use.

10-bit color space is for D-Log M or HLG only.

Sorry but not sure where you’re getting your information from.

 

[globetrotterdrone]

Might help to correct the distortion:

 

[WithTheBirds]

Might help to correct the distortion:

Easy enough to correct in post. A simple addition to the workflow and likely available in the software you would presumably employ with DLOg footage.

 

[Peio64270]

(...)

Has the quality of 4K FOV and 4K HQ videos improved by now?

Cheers,
Daniel

Hi Daniel,

I have (I should say "I had") the same concern and I still use my Mavic Pro 1st Gen., 2 1/2 years old now.
I didn't read any new test showing that DJI improved the resolution and the distorsion problems of the Mavic 2 Pro camera and I don't see the usefulness of investing $$ in a drone which uses only partially the sensor which makes theoretically the major improvement over the old Mavic Pro. Concerning the Mavic 2 Zoom, only the gimbal problem (horizon tilting when yawing or paning) of my Mavic 1 could motivate me to upgrade but for the moment, it doesn't worth the money.

 

[PAW]

Beautiful video JS. What tracking modes were you in and did you select the middle car as the "target" to track?

 

[CanadaDrone]

Has the quality of 4K FOV and 4K HQ videos improved by now?

Quality is the same. HQ is very good, albeit at a ~40mm FOV equivalent. FOV is not as good, but you get the full 28mm FOV and for most end use scenarios I don't think many people would notice that it's worse, especially if it's edited well. Maybe a Platinum version will come out and give us full sensor width readout 4K, but it's really quite acceptable as-is in my opinion.

I wish they had a D-Cinelike mode as well but you can get close by just shooting in normal with -3 contrast.

 

[dawaske]

I don't see the usefulness of investing $$ in a drone which uses only partially the sensor which makes theoretically the major improvement over the old Mavic Pro.

My thoughts exactly, even though I gotta say that even when using part of the sensor in HQ mode each pixel receives more light than with the Zoom, so the 2 Pro still has an advantage in low light conditions. That said, just yesterday I discovered the ICARUS LUTs for the Mavic Pro 1, which made my existing footage a lot better. Here's an example:

Untouched Video (D-Cinelike; +1,-1, 0; AWB)

Final Video (ICARUS V.3 D-Cinelike Sunny WB - Film, Saturation Master -10%, Exposure Master +3%, all done in FCPX)

However, especially towards the end you can see some serious quality issues on the left hand side (rocks and trees). The question now is: would the 2 Pro have done better here or would it have been enough to shoot in DLog mode on my Mavic?

Maybe a Platinum version will come out and give us full sensor width readout 4K

That thought has also crossed my mind. Imagine I buy the Pro and then a few months later they release the Pro Platinum, which fixes all of the quality issues and might even support 4K60. That would really piss me off...

 

[WithTheBirds]

Quality is the same. HQ is very good, albeit at a ~40mm FOV equivalent. FOV is not as good, but you get the full 28mm FOV and for most end use scenarios I don't think many people would notice that it's worse, especially if it's edited well. Maybe a Platinum version will come out and give us full sensor width readout 4K, but it's really quite acceptable as-is in my opinion.

I wish they had a D-Cinelike mode as well but you can get close by just shooting in normal with -3 contrast.

Have you considered that you may be unfairly judging the raw footage? A little sharpening in post and you will struggle to see a quality issue. Very difficult to pick from the P4P footage on a 4K television.

 

[Peio64270]

My thoughts exactly, even though I gotta say that even when using part of the sensor in HQ mode each pixel receives more light than with the Zoom, so the 2 Pro still has an advantage in low light conditions. That said, just yesterday I discovered the ICARUS LUTs for the Mavic Pro 1, which made my existing footage a lot better. Here's an example:

Untouched Video (D-Cinelike; +1,-1, 0; AWB)

Final Video (ICARUS V.3 D-Cinelike Sunny WB - Film, Saturation Master -10%, Exposure Master +3%, all done in FCPX)

However, especially towards the end you can see some serious quality issues on the left hand side (rocks and trees). The question now is: would the 2 Pro have done better here or would it have been enough to shoot in DLog mode on my Mavic?



That thought has also crossed my mind. Imagine I buy the Pro and then a few months later they release the Pro Platinum, which fixes all of the quality issues and might even support 4K60. That would really piss me off...

Yes, this is what I think.

I use Icarus LUTS with Premiere Pro for a while and I love them. I tried to shoot in D-Log mode but I came back to D-Cinelike which, to me, gives better results (in particular, I find the dynamics better with D-Cinelike).

 

[Peio64270]

(...)
That said, just yesterday I discovered the ICARUS LUTs for the Mavic Pro 1, which made my existing footage a lot better. Here's an example:

Untouched Video (D-Cinelike; +1,-1, 0; AWB)

Final Video (ICARUS V.3 D-Cinelike Sunny WB - Film, Saturation Master -10%, Exposure Master +3%, all done in FCPX)

I had a quick look at your videos not with a 4K screen but with RGB setting) and they are excellent.
Apparently, your Mavic also suffers from this tilted horizon problem but it looks much less important than mine (sometimes, I have to correct by more than +/- 2°).

That's a pity DJI was not able to fix this issue. Otherwise, the Mavic 1 would be a great machine with a pretty decent camera.

 

[dawaske]

Actually, I don't think my Mavic really suffers from this tilted horizon thing, at least judging from some of the pictures I took:

(untouched photo)

Yes, the horizon is slightly off there, but that actually also varies from picture to picture:


I do know what you're talking about though since the Mavic I had before (I accidentally crashed it into a bridge...) was really bad:


I suppose that, with everything that's going on during such a 360° circle, the gimbal sometimes does not properly adjust the horizon mid-flight, especially when there's wind present.

But back to topic:
Today I went out again to do some more testing. Special attention was paid to flight modes I've never used before there, namely QuickShot, TapFly, Home Lock and Waypoints. I gotta say I was quite disappointed...

• QuickShot really seems more like a gimmick for social media since I cannot customize anything except for speed (like duration, maximum altitude/ distance etc.). From what I've seen on YouTube the Mavic 2 is not much better in this regard, but just replaces the speed adjustment with distance/ direction of rotation. The M2 at least offers more QuickShot modes.
• TapFly on the Mavic is basically useless in my opinion since I cannot adjust the yaw (and, therefore, the camera orientation). Also, when I tap somewhere that is not at the exact same hight as the drone, the aircraft descends or ascends during flight and there is no way I can keep it from doing so (admittedly, this kind of makes sense as it is trying to reach the exact location that I pointed at; but still, it would've been nice to just set the (horizontal) direction of flight by tapping somewhere and adjust altitude as I wish mid-flight. I am aware that this functionality can be achieved with Course Lock, but it would be more convenient if I could just select the direction via a tap. To my understanding the TapFly mode on the Mavic 2 allows that?)
• Home Lock is probably the flight mode I understand the least. Can please anyone explain to me a reasonable use case?
• Waypoints on the other hand would be really cool if it wasn't so constrained and inconvenient to set up. I mean seriously, why can't I define waypoints that are more than 500m away from me? And why can't I use Google Maps or something to select the waypoints beforehand? Also this the Mavic 2 does a lot better from what I saw on YT! I just have one question: does Waypoint 2.0 have a similar limitation as Waypoint v1 when it comes to the maximum distance from home?

Regarding the other flight modes, I mainly use Cinematic Mode, Tripod Mode, Point of Interest and Active Track, which mostly work fine. What I noticed with Point of Interest is that the Mavic does not always keep the origin it is circling around in the center of the frame. Has the Mavic 2 improved on that?
Finally there's Active Track v1, which is so cool but also so dangerous and delicate to get right. Am I right in the assumption that with all the additional obstacle avoidance sensors and the improved tracking the M2 does perform significantly better than the original Mavic?

Today I also did further tests of the video quality, and here again I noticed the very non-smooth recording of fast moving objects:

Video 1
Video 2

Especially the second video is just horrible with all the stuttering (the sharpness issues are my fault). But also in the first one moving objects are not captured very clearly. Is this due to 30FPS, low bitrate or something else?

Last but not least there's the picture quality. I shot in DNG + JPEG mode for the first time today (D-Cinelike; +1, -1, 0; AWB) and what I noticed was that the JPEG (left) is a lot sharper than the DNG (right) no matter what I tried during development:

The sharpness issues become apparent on the lower right where the trees are, for example. On the other hand, there's a lot more detail in the clouds in the right picture.
I gotta admit this is the first time I'm working with RAW-files so it's totally possible that there's a way to improve the sharpness, but the regular "sharpen" filter in Luminar 3 definitely does not suffice, not even when turned all the way up to 100%.

I use Icarus LUTS with Premiere Pro for a while and I love them. I tried to shoot in D-Log mode but I came back to D-Cinelike which, to me, gives better results (in particular, I find the dynamics better with D-Cinelike).

I reached the exact same conclusion today after trying to post process the footage I shot today in D-Log (also using the ICARUS LUTs). The question then is: if I'm not capable of properly processing D-Log material from the M1, what are the chances I'll be more successful with the M2 Pro? Is it enough to apply the official DJI DLog-M LUT as well as this Barrel Distortion Correction and I'm good to go?

Sorry for this very long post

 

[CanadaDrone]

Have you considered that you may be unfairly judging the raw footage? A little sharpening in post and you will struggle to see a quality issue. Very difficult to pick from the P4P footage on a 4K television.

I apologize for any confusion - I said in my post that I don't think many people would notice a difference, especially if it's edited well, between HQ and FOV on the M2P. Without anything to compare to, everything looks good in isolation. Compared side-by-side to P4P footage though the difference is quite noticeable, at least to my eye. That doesn't mean the M2P footage is poor in comparison, just that there is a noticeable difference.

I don't know about your specific setup, but most people sit way too far away from their 4K TV's for the resolution to even matter For example if you have a 65" TV you should be sitting 4-6 feet away for any meaningful resolution benefit, and in most people's setups (living room, bonus room, etc.) viewing distances are much greater than that. The projector world sees much more significant benefits from 4K playback resolution due to screen size, but the best part about proper 4K content in my opinion isn't the resolution, it's the HDR and P3 color gamuts.

 

[WithTheBirds]

I apologize for any confusion - I said in my post that I don't think many people would notice a difference, especially if it's edited well, between HQ and FOV on the M2P. Without anything to compare to, everything looks good in isolation. Compared side-by-side to P4P footage though the difference is quite noticeable, at least to my eye. That doesn't mean the M2P footage is poor in comparison, just that there is a noticeable difference.

I don't know about your specific setup, but most people sit way too far away from their 4K TV's for the resolution to even matter For example if you have a 65" TV you should be sitting 4-6 feet away for any meaningful resolution benefit, and in most people's setups (living room, bonus room, etc.) viewing distances are much greater than that. The projector world sees much more significant benefits from 4K playback resolution due to screen size, but the best part about proper 4K content in my opinion isn't the resolution, it's the HDR and P3 color gamuts.

Yes... straight off the SD card I can see a difference also however I also find the M2P footage can be easily sharpened to look very similar to P4P. It might be that the P4P video SOC applies some sharpening? My point really is though (like you are saying) what is most important is how the rendered footage looks in a typical viewing situation. I suspect, as is often the case with any digital imaging systems, those who are grizzling loudest about pixel level observations of test charts aren’t actually using the drone for the intended purpose.

 

[Sockeye]

The quality was good when it was released and still is.

Farting around shooting test charts (often without understanding how to do that properly) and pixel peeping are different things to real world use and producing nice video.

Interesting point of view. But this "pixel peeping" was done with exact knowledge of what is being done.

Of course if you cannot optically distinguish between 4K and 2.7k, and watch your videos on 1080p Monitor with the media crunched by Youtube, it will make no difference.
But if you use your footage for nature documentations shown in cinemas, you can clearly see the difference. Therefore the disappointment about the 4K FOV lie by DJI can be understood.

But coming back to the original question. The picture quality of the Mavic 2 Pro is clearly better than the quality of the Mavic 1.