Mavic 2 Pro + Davinci Resolve + Capture One

[dv8ed]

For those that have been waiting to see some M2P footage, check out my YouTube channel: Roamer105: Roamer105
There are some new videos (will be more coming) taken with the Mavic 2 Pro in HQ (Dlog-M, HLG and Normal modes).

Wow Utah is beautiful! After seeing your footage it makes me want to retake my footage in H265 DLOG, appears to be less noise than Normal/H265 profile.

 

[Roamer105]

Wow Utah is beautiful! After seeing your footage it makes me want to retake my footage in H265 DLOG, appears to be less noise than Normal/H265 profile.

Yes there are lots of places to shoot some great scenery especially with a drone since many of the places are difficult to get to.

I shoot all of my recent footage in HQ-DlogM 24fps with some exceptions where I shoot FOV DlogM. I use an ND16 aperture typically set at F3.5. I don't much care about shooting with slow shutter like 2xfps (I don't like excessive motion blur), so the ND16 will put me around 1/120-1/500 at F3.5 and EV0. As long as I am within that range, I don't get prop-shadows which will appear at much faster shutter speeds. I use Style=+1,-1,0 and post process it with Resolve Studio 15. I usually drop the contrast to 0.9 or 0.8 in some cases, lift shadows a little if needed, fix white balance and apply my own favorite LUT (derived from SkyGrades Natural Shadows), boost "midtone details" to 30-40 and apply light temporal noise reduction (Project defaults: Optical Flow, Enhanced Better and Large) set to Better/Large with a value between 10-30. Depending on subject matter, I may also apply very light sharpening (Sharpen: Amount=2, Fine detail=0.02, with fine detail amount=1 to 1.5, the rest default). Make sure that sharpening is applied AFTER the noise reduction node and everything else before noise reduction. The final render I set to MP4, H264 UHD at 150Mb/s. I also force sizing (for optical fix and/or horizon fix) to highest quality. With the latest Resolve Studio (15.2) is is now possible to render in H265 (8 or 10 bit). I played with it and chose H265 at 100Mb/s 10bit - that works very well.

While HLG does work OK, as long as I do not actually produce real HDR footage (I have not means to grade it properly - or view it for that matter), I don't care to use HLG. The big drawback on HLG footage is the significantly increased noise.

 

[Synephrine]

Yes there are lots of places to shoot some great scenery especially with a drone since many of the places are difficult to get to.

I shoot all of my recent footage in HQ-DlogM 24fps with some exceptions where I shoot FOV DlogM. I use an ND16 aperture typically set at F3.5. I don't much care about shooting with slow shutter like 2xfps (I don't like excessive motion blur), so the ND16 will put me around 1/120-1/500 at F3.5 and EV0. As long as I am within that range, I don't get prop-shadows which will appear at much faster shutter speeds. I use Style=+1,-1,0 and post process it with Resolve Studio 15. I usually drop the contrast to 0.9 or 0.8 in some cases, lift shadows a little if needed, fix white balance and apply my own favorite LUT (derived from SkyGrades Natural Shadows), boost "midtone details" to 30-40 and apply light temporal noise reduction (Project defaults: Optical Flow, Enhanced Better and Large) set to Better/Large with a value between 10-30. Depending on subject matter, I may also apply very light sharpening (Sharpen: Amount=2, Fine detail=0.02, with fine detail amount=1 to 1.5, the rest default). Make sure that sharpening is applied AFTER the noise reduction node and everything else before noise reduction. The final render I set to MP4, H264 UHD at 150Mb/s. I also force sizing (for optical fix and/or horizon fix) to highest quality. With the latest Resolve Studio (15.2) is is now possible to render in H265 (8 or 10 bit). I played with it and chose H265 at 100Mb/s 10bit - that works very well.

While HLG does work OK, as long as I do not actually produce real HDR footage (I have not means to grade it properly - or view it for that matter), I don't care to use HLG. The big drawback on HLG footage is the significantly increased noise.

Thanks for sharing these details. I've always assumed to stick with the 2xfps rule and have not dabbled with higher SPs.
I'll experiment a bit in future flights and see how I fare with post work in resolve studio.
Thanks again!

 

[Roamer105]

Thanks for sharing these details. I've always assumed to stick with the 2xfps rule and have not dabbled with higher SPs.
I'll experiment a bit in future flights and see how I fare with post work in resolve studio.
Thanks again!

Use the Style= 1,-1,0 judiciously as it works fine for some high contrast (good lighting) situations but more often that not it is actually better to use 1,0,0 and then deal with enhancing shadows in post without significant noise problems. Dropping the contrast does let encoder discard some finer details that would otherwise make it with Style=1,0,0.

After installing this latest firmware I re-tested the camera just to make sure that there are no significant differences. I have to do some more work re-visiting older recordings but it appears that (even though DJI did not mention anything about this in their release notes) the noise has been further reduced, but the contrast has been softened a bit which makes me want to use 1,0,0 or even 1,1,0 (landscape) more readily. This is just a superficial, subjective observation so far.

 

[kilomikebravo]

..which makes me want to use 1,0,0 or even 1,1,0

Many thanks for the detailed observations. Here I thought my camera settings were right where I wanted them but now I’m definitely going to check out your post-update suggestions.

KB

 

[waynesi]

Hi all,

I'm a happy new owner of Mavic 2 Pro, and I took lots of DLog-M 10bit videos in my recent holiday. I use the latest Win 10 at home and I downloaded and installed the latest non-paid Davinci Resolve v15 many times from the official website because of the Media Offline error. I can confirm the latest non-paid/free DR v15 doesn't work with DLog-M 10bit H.265 MP4 on Windows 10 !out of box!. The magic is, you have to download a special Windows update from Windows Store. The app is called HEVC Video Extensions which is from Microsoft to give *any* applications on Windows 10 the ability to open and play H.265 files but MS charges you $1 for this. The good news is, there is also a free but absolutely identical app also from Microsoft on the Windows Store calledHEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer. After installing this update and restarting DR v15, no more errors.

 

[eliapi]

Hi all,

I'm a happy new owner of Mavic 2 Pro, and I took lots of DLog-M 10bit videos in my recent holiday. I use the latest Win 10 at home and I downloaded and installed the latest non-paid Davinci Resolve v15 many times from the official website because of the Media Offline error. I can confirm the latest non-paid/free DR v15 doesn't work with DLog-M 10bit H.265 MP4 on Windows 10 !out of box!. The magic is, you have to download a special Windows update from Windows Store. The app is called HEVC Video Extensions which is from Microsoft to give *any* applications on Windows 10 the ability to open and play H.265 files but MS charges you $1 for this. The good news is, there is also a free but absolutely identical app also from Microsoft on the Windows Store calledHEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer. After installing this update and restarting DR v15, no more errors.

Thank you so much! It worked!

I wasted sooo much time looking for a solution!

 

[MiDo21]

O

Hi all,

I'm a happy new owner of Mavic 2 Pro, and I took lots of DLog-M 10bit videos in my recent holiday. I use the latest Win 10 at home and I downloaded and installed the latest non-paid Davinci Resolve v15 many times from the official website because of the Media Offline error. I can confirm the latest non-paid/free DR v15 doesn't work with DLog-M 10bit H.265 MP4 on Windows 10 !out of box!. The magic is, you have to download a special Windows update from Windows Store. The app is called HEVC Video Extensions which is from Microsoft to give *any* applications on Windows 10 the ability to open and play H.265 files but MS charges you $1 for this. The good news is, there is also a free but absolutely identical app also from Microsoft on the Windows Store calledHEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer. After installing this update and restarting DR v15, no more errors.

On contrary to "HEVC Video Extensions" which is a paid piece of crap (= not possible even to get installed on Win 10) the free "HEVC Video Extensions from the Device Manufacturer" works quite well. It takes few minutes to find it (... not officially offered through Microsoft Store in Central Europe) but it fixes all my issues with H265 in free Davinci Resolve. I take 1 UDS spent on first one to be a tax for my stupidity. Next time I'll start with free options first. Many thanks for excellent advice. MIchal

 

[oth29]

Yes there are lots of places to shoot some great scenery especially with a drone since many of the places are difficult to get to.

I shoot all of my recent footage in HQ-DlogM 24fps with some exceptions where I shoot FOV DlogM. I use an ND16 aperture typically set at F3.5. I don't much care about shooting with slow shutter like 2xfps (I don't like excessive motion blur), so the ND16 will put me around 1/120-1/500 at F3.5 and EV0. As long as I am within that range, I don't get prop-shadows which will appear at much faster shutter speeds. I use Style=+1,-1,0 and post process it with Resolve Studio 15. I usually drop the contrast to 0.9 or 0.8 in some cases, lift shadows a little if needed, fix white balance and apply my own favorite LUT (derived from SkyGrades Natural Shadows), boost "midtone details" to 30-40 and apply light temporal noise reduction (Project defaults: Optical Flow, Enhanced Better and Large) set to Better/Large with a value between 10-30. Depending on subject matter, I may also apply very light sharpening (Sharpen: Amount=2, Fine detail=0.02, with fine detail amount=1 to 1.5, the rest default). Make sure that sharpening is applied AFTER the noise reduction node and everything else before noise reduction. The final render I set to MP4, H264 UHD at 150Mb/s. I also force sizing (for optical fix and/or horizon fix) to highest quality. With the latest Resolve Studio (15.2) is is now possible to render in H265 (8 or 10 bit). I played with it and chose H265 at 100Mb/s 10bit - that works very well.

While HLG does work OK, as long as I do not actually produce real HDR footage (I have not means to grade it properly - or view it for that matter), I don't care to use HLG. The big drawback on HLG footage is the significantly increased noise.

Very useful info, thanks for sharing !

When you mention "midtone details" here, do you mean the setting found in the Camera Raw tab ? This one is always greyed out when I'm working with my M2P footages. Do you have a particular Project settings to get access to it ?

 

[Roamer105]

Very useful info, thanks for sharing !

When you mention "midtone details" here, do you mean the setting found in the Camera Raw tab ? This one is always greyed out when I'm working with my M2P footages. Do you have a particular Project settings to get access to it ?

"Midtone Details" is a setting on the "Color" page of Resolve. You can find it by selecting "Color Wheels" (bottom left area) then look for items on the very bottom row (there are two "pages" of them) - Midtone detail is on the second one.

Also - since I posted this, I settled on style=1,0,0 with HQ-DlogM with EV as close to 0 as possible, but error on negative (not positive). DlogM is very forgiving on the negative range, but clips highlights quickly when EV reaches more than +1. BTW: I don't bother fixing barrel distortion for most of my shots when I use HQ since there is so little. It makes panning shots much more natural if no correction is applied.

I have also created my on LUTs. One for sunny and one for cloudy.
Cloudy: M2P__MY_DlogM_709_FAVORITE2 SHADOWS.cube
Sunny: M2P__MY_DlogM_709_FAVORITE2_SUNNY.cube

 

[alfogator]

Had the same problem on a PC with Windows 10 and found a solution on a different forum that worked for me, so I'm posting it as reference:

HEVC support from Windows 10 has been dropped at some point in time and it requires a download from the Windows Store.

The store has two separate downloads available:

HEVC Video Extensions (0.99$)
HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer (free)

I'm not 100% sure about the differences, my guess is that the second one works only on specific CPU/GPU that have hardware support for HEVC.

I installed the free version on my Ryzen 1700X/Nvidia 1080Ti PC and now Davinci Resolve Free works fine with DLog files without displaying offline media.

 

[skysthelimit]

@Roamer105 What platform are you running DR on? I've tried to import using DR16BETA on both Linux Mint 18 and Win7 (with H.265 codecs installed as I can play H.265 mp4 files using media player) and it doesn't work at all - no clip shows up and no preview (and no import errors).