Might reconsider lowering sharpness.

brad12d3 · May 20, 2017

So I ran through the settings when I had my P4 and learned that it's camera needed to be approached a bit differently than some other cameras, i.e. DSLRs. DLog was trash. Completely smeared the detail and honestly was probably straining the weak codec too much. I ended up using ART to get a bit flatter look but not too much.

The other thing I discovered is that lowering sharpness completely wiped away the detail just like DLog did. I'm not talking about the detail being a little fuzzier... no... it's simply not there anymore. You can't add unsharp mask in post and bring all the detail to life because it's not there.

What I did with my P4, what I will be doing with my Mavic, and what I recommend is to leave your sharpness setting to 0. Take a look at this picture.

EDIT: The below picture was taken from my Mavic that replaced my P4.

The left panel is unaltered raw footage with sharpness set at 0.

The center panel is identical except the sharpness is set to -1.

The right panel is the center panel shot but with unsharp mask applied and set to 150.
As you can see, it doesn't do any good when it doesn't have anything to work with.

Xcel · May 20, 2017

Good example! Could you try in camera sharpness +1 as well for a comparison. I've started using +1 as many have suggested on this forum.

brad12d3 · May 20, 2017

Xcel said:
Good example! Could you try in camera sharpness +1 as well for a comparison. I've started using +1 as many have suggested on this forum.

Yeah I just stumbled upon this video:
Great results and he uses DLog at 2K with Sharpness +1

From what he says, it sound like DJI is using some sort of denoiser and it's what's wiping out the detail. Going +1 sort of negates that.

What was really interesting is that he filmed that in DLog which apparently must be way better than it was on the P4. DLog on my P4 absolutely destroyed detail. It was like having other profiles set to -3 sharpness. I was just about to go back out and test DLog on my mavic, but it started raining.

Another tip: If you have after effects and Neat Video. Go run the raw clip through that, make sure your project settings are at 16 bit, dither it with some noise.. maybe around 1% and export to a quality codec like ProRes 422 or similar. It obviously won't magically add color info that wasn't there, but it does a nice job of smoothing things out a bit and making the footage a bit more malleable.

That's a trick I learned from this guy: