Mavic pro flickering: Davinci resolve vs Neat video

cranngel · Jan 27, 2018

Gastone360, I played with cutting it down, 15 was acceptable but 20 still seemed better. On my monitor (iMAC 5K), this specific clip, and my eyes, I did not see much true sharpness degradation (DLOG +1 sharpness). I did see "fake" sharpness reduction (noise, etc.). I think the true sharpness is being limited by the optics.

In fact, with the +1 sharpness, it still seemed over-sharpened with halos on hard contrast edges. To get a more natural look, I used the Davinci Blur tool with a setting of .55 and a key output setting of 0.2. This tamed the halo's pretty well (did not eliminate them). It did soften the image but to me the softening was only visible at over 150% ~ 200% viewing. You can notice the effects at 100% but only the fact that you are knocking down the edge halos. Looks much more natural to me but I need to try it on more clips to see if it holds true in general. I am also going to go back and try 0 sharpness setting. In hard contrast lighting, the +1 just looks over-sharpened. In lighting with less contrast, I think it may be OK. I would be interested in hearing if others are seeing these halos and if the above helps or hurts the image in other clips.

I also did a test at 2.7K and 24fps which has a much better (lower) compression ratio and it needed little to no filtering for the flicker. Once I get the "best" possible 4K@30 settings I will compare to 2.7k and see if I really see a difference in resolution and if it is worth the increase in storage/processing. I have seen YT videos that show that the mavic does indeed resolve more at 4K than 2.7k on a resolution chart, but after I knock down the flickering and maybe some of the halos, I am not yet sure it will be seen in practice.

Castyn · Jan 27, 2018

Here are some different videos I ran the settings on, same results

Vineyard Base File
Vineyard Noise Reduction

cranngel · Jan 27, 2018

Castyn said:
Here are some different videos I ran the settings on, same results

Vineyard Base File
Vineyard Noise Reduction

Seems like it made a decent improvement but clearly did not eliminate it. You might play with the luma/chroma parameters. That clip has a lot of details and motion at the same time and given the bandwidth limitations and compression on the Mavic, there are some clips that I don't think you can ever make look good unfortunately....

Seems like it may have been captured in a higher frame rate and could use more motion blur. While I have not tried it, Davinci also has a motion blur setting (next to the temporal and spacial noise controls) that might smooth out some of the choppiness .... not sure if it would help or hurt.

Another thing I forgot to mention, with the Mavic, there seems to be two issues going on that both seem to get lumped into the category of "flicker". The first is the fine detail noise or "mosquito" noise that moves around and pulses on GOP frames. This looks like there is mosquitos or ants moving around areas of high detail. That is what I was working on for the above settings.

The second is jumps in perceived brightness (up or down) that also occurs in the GOP frames. The settings I have been using help some with that but don't really address it. I am hoping that one of the timelapse deflicker plugins will help but I have not gotten to that yet. If you look on the scopes, especially after you knock down some of the mosquito noise, you can see clearly see histograms bounce for 1 frame.

What was the video settings (resolution, frame rate, sharpness, color) used to capture it ? I think the clip is 1080P but not sure if it as been manipulated in post.

cranngel · Jan 27, 2018

Update on the effort to knock down the over-sharpening ... tried a different approach that I think works a little better. Took the output from the TNR node and ran it to a layer/combiner node along with a Gaussian blurred version of itself. Settings were, Gaussian blur (strength=.14, blend=.5), combiner node Composite Mode on "Darken". I used "Darken" because the halos are too bright. You can adjust the blur strength/blend up or down depending on the halo/softness balance you want.

Castyn · Jan 27, 2018

cranngel said:
Seems like it made a decent improvement but clearly did not eliminate it. You might play with the luma/chroma parameters. That clip has a lot of details and motion at the same time and given the bandwidth limitations and compression on the Mavic, there are some clips that I don't think you can ever make look good unfortunately....

Seems like it may have been captured in a higher frame rate and could use more motion blur. While I have not tried it, Davinci also has a motion blur setting (next to the temporal and spacial noise controls) that might smooth out some of the choppiness .... not sure if it would help or hurt.

Another thing I forgot to mention, with the Mavic, there seems to be two issues going on that both seem to get lumped into the category of "flicker". The first is the fine detail noise or "mosquito" noise that moves around and pulses on GOP frames. This looks like there is mosquitos or ants moving around areas of high detail. That is what I was working on for the above settings.

The second is jumps in perceived brightness (up or down) that also occurs in the GOP frames. The settings I have been using help some with that but don't really address it. I am hoping that one of the timelapse deflicker plugins will help but I have not gotten to that yet. If you look on the scopes, especially after you knock down some of the mosquito noise, you can see clearly see histograms bounce for 1 frame.

What was the video settings (resolution, frame rate, sharpness, color) used to capture it ? I think the clip is 1080P but not sure if it as been manipulated in post.

Those shots were 4k @ 24fps, 100 iso 0-0-0. Since then I have moved to 2.7k @ 30fps, and typically go 0-0-0 or -1-0-0 now in D-log in an attempt to mitigate these issues, but am still not having much luck. I always use ND8 or ND16 filters as well. Not really sure what I should be using the settings at anymore given all the different attempts that I have made.

cranngel · Jan 27, 2018

Castyn said:
Those shots were 4k @ 24fps, 100 iso 0-0-0. Since then I have moved to 2.7k @ 30fps, and typically go 0-0-0 or -1-0-0 now in D-log in an attempt to mitigate these issues, but am still not having much luck. I always use ND8 or ND16 filters as well. Not really sure what I should be using the settings at anymore given all the different attempts that I have made.

That all sounds reasonable. If you are willing to go down to 2.7k, you might try 24fps and adjust shutter speed/ND filter accordingly. The compression ratio is less (22.2 vs 17.8) and the video is cleaner (at least to me). But, overall, I am quite disappointed in the Mavic video quality. On my clips, these settings help but do not fix it. I have been using DLog as well but am going to try some of the others. I am wondering if the manipulation to get back contrast and saturation makes these issues worse. I believe DLog does have better dynamic range but ...

It will be interesting to see how the new Mavic Air with the 100mbps record limit will improve things since it has the same sensor size.

Roamer105 · Mar 26, 2018

I use Davinci Resolve Studio 14.3 and really like it a lot. It does an amazing job for the relatively modest price (less than $300) now. However when it comes to noise reduction and general pre-treatment of the raw footage, Neat Video is simply unbeatable.

I recently purchased the Neat Video OFX plug-in for Resolve. Unfortunately it is quite expensive - set me back another $265 (with tax), but it is well worth it if you really want to produce very clean, yet crisp high quality 4K MP footage that in the end approaches "national geographic" quality. Unfortunately for many of us amateurs we simply have a difficult time using Neat Video because it requires an enormous amount of processing power/time, but if you have something precious to produce - who cares how long it takes to produce it.

I have some footage I took during a one overnight stay in the "Goose Necks" State Park in south-eastern Utah (near Mexican Hat). I got there very late and the light was fading fast. Hurrying to get going, I forgot to pull the ND8 filter making things all that much more difficult. The result, extremely slow shutter speed and under-exposed footage. Looking at it without any filtering was a major disappointment. The footage was so noisy I thought it would be a throw-away. Even part two of the footage taken at sunrise the next morning ended up as a serious noise challenge (I again forgot to remove the ND8! - not sure my brain was functioning). Using Resolve's temporal NR at best settings produced a reasonable result, but still quite noisy and not quite able to eliminate the GOP pulsing. Adding spacial NR helped, but a lot of the details simply vanished.

After getting the Neat Video plugin I gave it another try creating a noise profile for that footage and then process it at best settings for both temporal and spacial filters. I added the Neat Video (smart) sharpening (high frequency at 100%, medium OFF, low at 20%) and artifact removal as well. Since it is 4K footage, at that setting final rendering averaged about 2 frames/sec on my expensive (i9-7940X at 4.5Ghz and 12Gb Nvidia Titan xp) workhorse machine. I wish it was faster, but I am OK with that speed given the low frame rate I had chosen. Neat Video offers "neatbench" (free) which will check your machine for ability and speed of Neat Video processing. My system benchmarks at 46 frames/sec giving you a yardstick.

Video footage: Mavic Pro 4K UHD/24fps, Dlog with 2,1,0 setting unfortunately underexposed with slowest shutter speed selected.
Neat Video plugin settings using clip specific noise analysis:
Temporal: to 5 (5 frames ahead and 5 frames behind) at HIGH setting
Spacial: 40% (default) at HIGH setting and Artifact removal and Sharpening (high frequency at 100%, medium OFF, low at 20%)

Bottom line - If you have difficult footage and are a stickler for best 4K quality, Neat Video is the answer. In my experience, Resolve's temporal NR is simply not able to eliminate the low exposure (high noise) GOP pulsing in this particular and a number of other footage I worked with. The DJI encoder in the Mavic Pro uses an 8-frame GOP structure (1 I-Frame and 7 P-Frames - or predictive frames). Neat Video's temporal NR evaluates at its best settings a window of 10 frames (+/-5 at a setting of 5) which will always include at least 1 I-Frame (I-frame: highest resolution - most noise and details frame). If the noise profile is good then Neat Video is able to reduce the GOP pulsing to an imperceptible level.

Here's a link to that video: (I just uploaded this video - give YouTube some time to process all qualities including UHD)

Roamer105 · May 7, 2018

Since Davinci Resolve Studio Beta 2 has been released, I've been going back over some previously processed footage including some that I applied the Neat Video plugin in Resolve 14. I must say I am very pleasantly surprised about the many improvements and additional capabilities of Resolve 15. Sure there are still glitches, but it is still beta software. The one part that really amazed me a lot is the improvements on previously existing functions such as temporal noise reduction. Resolve 15b2 TNR is vastly improved over the prior versions. It also processes faster - in fact, in its best quality settings, it processes video about 8-9 times faster than Neat Video in comparable settings (on my machine). The resulting video in some cases is quite a bit better now than what I can get out of Neat Video. I highly recommend Resolve 15 (b2). Of course, it has some bugs and the NV plugin has some weird issues when applied to group or shared nodes. But I am sure that will be all resolved (no pun intended) soon.

Roamer105 · Jul 12, 2018

It has been a while since this thread was active. Meanwhile, Resolve 15 is at Beta 6 with a tremendous amount of improvements. One aspect that applies to this thread in particular is a significantly enhanced motion prediction engine that, if tuned to "Enhanced Better" mode affects the temporal noise reduction as well as the spacial noise reduction features. When set to Enhanced Better and temporal NR at setting "5" and 100% and "better" eliminates close to 100% of video noise as well as the classic long-GOP pulsation with practically zero loss of video detail. This is particularly true if combined with about 20% of spacial NR set to Enhanced. I add a subsequent node using the "Soften/Sharpen" filter where I set high frequency to +.9, the mid frequency to 0 and the low frequency to +.3. The results are absolutely stunning!

Turns out that it will consume a fair amount of processing power, all of it will be deferred to the GPU(s) if so desired. As it stands best settings on Resolve is about twice as fast as Neat Video with best settings.

Marco Cantieni · Jul 13, 2018

After going through all this mess with the Mavics 4K issues, I've finally found a good workflow:

1. It starts with filming in 2.7K, ISO100, 60-120fps using an ND16 filter, sharpness +1 contrast -1, saturation -1, color profile ART or D-Log. I prefer filming in 2.7k over 4k because of a better image size/compression ratio of the Mavic Pro.

2. I've colorgraded the footage using mLUT from motionvfx.

3. Then I've reduced the GOP effect and removed existing noise with NeatVideo using the profile specifically created for the Mavic Pro by "The Film Poets"

Since the results don't have the ultimate detail of a 4K footage it is pretty decent. A nice side effect is that working with 2.7k files is more fluently than with 4k files.