Mavic 2 Pro Normal vs DLOG

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

The point is adjusting your settings manually contribute to a better picture. OP was disappointed with soft DLOG footage. I was simply suggesting manual control of settings for better quality.

DLOG is for high contrast situations otherwise you pretty much can get the same results without it and there really is no need for it.

Okay, I think we're just going to have to disagree on this.

My parting comments are that rather than say it is "only for high contrast situations", I would prefer to say that it's "designed to capture high dynamic range, which would otherwise not be attainable". Great scenes in sunlight are very much high dynamic range (aka "high contrast"), so unless you only shoot downwards on cloudy days, you're are in a "high dynamic situation" most of the time, so you will not really get "the same results" without it.

Chris

 

[BCMEDIC625]

What (recommended) person or videos that use light room or photoshop on youtube does everyone recommend? A certain person to subscribe to that would best help me understand editing and improving videos and photos. I fly a M2P. Any info would be greatly appreciated, thanks

 

[SE-AKKA]

Thanks CaptHook for an excellent investigation on the normal vs dlog recording. In August 2019 I made more or less the same studies but I limited my research to HD-format. But I didn't see any advantages for using Dlog. Now I have upgraded to DaVinci Resolve Studio and I can see new challenges to use higher resolutions. So I made new tests in 4K HQ and I came to the same result as you did. Dlog is just too blurry. Ok using sharpening improves it, but why using dlog when you have to put a lot of grading-job to achieve the same result as the camera do in Normal.

 

[brett8883]

You guys should use Davinci Resolve colorspace transform tool to convert dlog to rec.709 or whatever your timeline colorspace is. A colorspace transform will do luminance mapping where a LUT does not so you will get better results.

 

[brett8883]

Also use HLG mode instead if you have trouble with dLog. The best footage I’ve seen from the M2Pro is always shot in HLG.

 

[Cymru]

Im still not convinced of the advantage in cramming 10bit H265 video into a paltry 100mbps bit rate vs 8 bit.
Ultimately, its going to have to use MORE compression to get it to fit.
It's useful in high dynamic range scenes BUT may well be sacrificing artefacts on rapid motion at the same time as compression compensates.

4k/10 bit/h265 into 100mbps really is a tiny bandwidth pipe to utilise.

 

[brett8883]

Im still not convinced of the advantage in cramming 10bit H265 video into a paltry 100mbps bit rate vs 8 bit.
Ultimately, its going to have to use MORE compression to get it to fit.
It's useful in high dynamic range scenes BUT may well be sacrificing artefacts on rapid motion at the same time as compression compensates.

4k/10 bit/h265 into 100mbps really is a tiny bandwidth pipe to utilise.

100mbps H.265 is like 200 Mbps h.264 and even something like the Sony A7S3 which is one of the top full frame pro-sumer grade video cameras on the market with unquestionable dynamic range only records a maximum 100mbps in 4k 24p 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 with H.265.

It’s true that you can shoot in all I codecs with it which will be helpful for VFX but there isn’t a noticeable visual difference between the two.

100mbps H265 is well past the point of having a visual impact on the footage and things like chroma subsampling and bit depth is WAY more important to flexibly in post than bit rate

 

[SeriousUndertaking]

You can do 8 bit h.265 as well. Its going to have less compression than 10bit for obvious reasons.

 

[brett8883]

You can do 8 bit h.265 as well. Its going to have less compression than 10bit for obvious reasons.

Are you sure it’s less compressed and not just a lower bit rate?

 

[CaptHook]

The main issue I have with Dlog is with the lens correction.
By 'de-warping' the image to remove the lens distortion, it causes the image to blur, considerably more so on the edges of the image.
Using the 'Normal' profile, the lens correction is done in camera and does an excellent job without introducing this blurring and resulting in a superior image IMO.

Interesting that the Color Transform in Resolve Studio has a profile for DJI Log, I hadn't seen that.

 

[brett8883]

The main issue I have with Dlog is with the lens correction.
By 'de-warping' the image to remove the lens distortion, it causes the image to blur, considerably more so on the edges of the image.
Using the 'Normal' profile, the lens correction is done in camera and does an excellent job without introducing this blurring and resulting in a superior image IMO.

Interesting that the Color Transform in Resolve Studio has a profile for DJI Log, I hadn't seen that.

There’s no blurring that occurs with lens correction settings in Resolve. Start there and figure out why that’s happening to you. It’s either you doing something wrong or a bug in your copy of resolve. Nobody else can replicate the issue so it’s with resolve not the footage.

Screen shot your lens correction settings for us

 

[CaptHook]

Here are a few more samples.
The first set are full shots.
The second set are zoomed 200% into the bottom left corner area.
4k/30fps/FOV
Dlog - DJI LUT added
Normal - SOC (straight out of camera)

Lens correction done in camera (Normal) is far superior than what can be achieved by stretching the pixels to flatten out the barrel distortion in post (Dlog).
Lots of the image is skewed, stretched and blurred.
For those reasons, I much prefer the image quality of Normal vs Dlog
DJI specs for FOV lens correction in Resolve is .245
Analyzing in Resolve produced .204 (smaller correction) and used in these comparisons.

DaVinci Resolve Studio 17.1 | Nvidia Studio 461.40
i9 10900K | 32GB 3200MHz RAM | RTX2070 SUPER 8GB | Windows 10 Home



.

 

[CaptHook]

For video, Resolve gives very good lens correction in the Fusion panel. If you're using the generic Lens Correction in the Inspector, I can see why you may not have been happy with it. But both have worked for me without reducing video quality.

Chris

Interesting Chris.
I mucked about for awhile with Fusion Lens Distort and found an amazing result!
Using the Distortion setting gave the same poor result.
However, using the Curvature Y setting at .13 gave a major improvement!
So it IS the Lens Correction on the Edit page Inspector AND the Distortion setting in Fusion that is resulting in the terrible image.
BUT - using a Curvature Y setting of .13 for FOV works much better.
I overlaid a grid pattern and adjusted until the horizon was flat.

However, the result is still worse than the Normal image.
And, a 10 second clip took several minutes to process, even with my computer with good specs.
So, interesting to find an 'off the books' method to improve the Dlog lens correction.
But Normal is still superior - and way faster (especially compared to Fusion),
so I will be sticking with Normal.

Images: Dlog with Fusion Lens Distort and Curvature Y of .13