MP footage critiqued by professional colorist

[its2loud]

Hey everyone,
I work in the post production industry and had the luxury of having a professional colorist and another video editor look at my footage. They both agree that the default setting on the Mavic for video is way to sharp. They suggest toning down the sharpness quite a bit. As for colors, he said they were spot on out of the box. I did not shoot in dlog since I wanted to see how the Mavic does with its own color profiles. I gave him 2k 30fps and 4K 30fps shots just to compare.
He was impressed that there was no color banding in the blue sky. He did notice some noise in the blues but mentioned this would go away by softening the image a bit.

I'm going to play around with the softness in the "custom" setting to find the sweet spot. I'll post my findings soon.

 

[BorisTheSpider]

Lowering sharpness unfortunately kills fine detail due to the low bitrate of the codec on the mavic.

Thanks for posting this though, interesting to see what people who are used to appraising videos from various cameras think of it.

Was the footage you showed them shot with the "none" profile?

 

[its2loud]

Hello,

Coincidentally, we discussed the low bitrate of the Mavic. Although I haven't tested this out yet, our theory is that since the bitrate is so low, it can't handle all the detail and sharpness while shooting in 4K. This is where the noise comes into play because the sensor has to replace those pixels with something. With the low bitrate, it's not able to get all of the information that is coming through the camera. By lowering the sharpness a little, you're essentially telling the camera to not send all the detail. It's a small compromise for a smoother picture. Like I said, I'll do some tests and post some shots.

 

[SeanOzz]

Hey everyone,
I work in the post production industry and had the luxury of having a professional colorist and another video editor look at my footage. They both agree that the default setting on the Mavic for video is way to sharp. They suggest toning down the sharpness quite a bit. As for colors, he said they were spot on out of the box. I did not shoot in dlog since I wanted to see how the Mavic does with its own color profiles. I gave him 2k 30fps and 4K 30fps shots just to compare.
He was impressed that there was no color banding in the blue sky. He did notice some noise in the blues but mentioned this would go away by softening the image a bit.

I'm going to play around with the softness in the "custom" setting to find the sweet spot. I'll post my findings soon.

I turn sharpness down -1
Then +1 on color and contrast.
That on true color save me a ton of post processing time.

Also I typically shoot in 1080 30fps

I'm also amazed with those settings how some of the stock filters look.

 

[Robert Mitchell]

Nice, thanks for the input. This should put to rest the argument that the Mavic can't be used for "professional" work... but I doubt it will.