No D-Log with H.264?

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

In my quest to find the best quality, I had been looking at 10-bit H.265, but (as mentioned in another thread), it may be too much for my current computer system (too jittery with LUT, lens distortion correction, and other effects applied).

So today I thought I would go out and shoot some scenes with both H.264 and H.265 so I could compare them, thinking maybe I could just make do with H.264 until I can rebuild this machine.

But I discovered that you can only do Normal color management with H.264 -- if you press the grayed-out D-log choice, DJI GO will tell you that you need to be in H.265 encoding mode.

REALLY? WHY? The whole world is using H.264 with color management, but that processing is not included on the M2P because it does H.265?

Is there a work-around? Is there a good reason for this? Am I completely mistaken? (I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the park bench with a powered-up AC on the ground, going through all the options trying to get it to work, to no avail.)

Thanks, Chris

PS: I went to the DJI site for this first, but their Mavic 2 forum areas seem kaput today. EDIT: I take that back -- they did another bonehead restructuring of their forum structure again. Every time they do this, it gets flatter.

 

[CanadaDrone]

There is a reasonable explanation for it. The 10bit D-Log in H264 would create enormous files and go beyond the drone's 100Mbps maximum bitrate - the more efficient H265 compression is used to keep you within those limits despite all the extra information added from 10bit D-Log.

No work around that I am aware of at the time of the shot, you won't be able to shoot 10bit D-Log without H265 on a M2P.

What you can do if you are having issues on the processing/editing side is just shoot in H265 D-Log as normal and then make the first step of your workflow a conversion from H265 to H264 using Handbrake (free software). After that you can edit as if it were shot in H264 without losing any information. File size will be larger of course.

 

[brett8883]

In my quest to find the best quality, I had been looking at 10-bit H.265, but (as mentioned in another thread), it may be too much for my current computer system (too jittery with LUT, lens distortion correction, and other effects applied).

So today I thought I would go out and shoot some scenes with both H.264 and H.265 so I could compare them, thinking maybe I could just make do with H.264 until I can rebuild this machine.

But I discovered that you can only do Normal color management with H.264 -- if you press the grayed-out D-log choice, DJI GO will tell you that you need to be in H.265 encoding mode.

REALLY? WHY? The whole world is using H.264 with color management, but that processing is not included on the M2P because it does H.265?

Is there a work-around? Is there a good reason for this? Am I completely mistaken? (I spent quite a bit of time sitting on the park bench with a powered-up AC on the ground, going through all the options trying to get it to work, to no avail.)

Thanks, Chris

PS: I went to the DJI site for this first, but their Mavic 2 forum areas seem kaput today. EDIT: I take that back -- they did another bonehead restructuring of their forum structure again. Every time they do this, it gets flatter.

I tend to think 8 bit D-log isn’t all that great anyway. Just dial down your contrast settings and you’ll get more range.

 

[WithTheBirds]

10bit H264 is a thing but it never really took off- there are few (if any) hardware decoder implementations. DJI was wise to leave it out as an option. It would create widespread frustrations as almost no televisions have the capability to decode it.

 

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Just to be clear, I wasn't talking about 10-bit h.264 in the OP.

I was thinking of backing off of 10-bit h.265 and falling back to 8-bit h.264, all due to performance hits on the 10-bit h.265.

But not being able to grade h.264 with LUTs, due to the lack of being able to choose d-log in the Mavic, was something of a shock.

I still have yet to upgrade Resolve to Studio to see if I get better performance from that.

Chris

 

[CanadaDrone]

Just to be clear, I wasn't talking about 10-bit h.264 in the OP.

I was thinking of backing off of 10-bit h.265 and falling back to 8-bit h.264, all due to performance hits on the 10-bit h.265.

But not being able to grade h.264 with LUTs, due to the lack of being able to choose d-log in the Mavic, was something of a shock.

I still have yet to upgrade Resolve to Studio to see if I get better performance from that.

Chris

You can grade 8bit H264 just fine with LUTs, just not the same LUT you might use for 10bit H265.

Also to my knowledge there will be no performance difference if you pay for Resolve Studio unless you have a multiple GPU setup. Last I checked, the primary difference between the free and paid version is the ability to export DCI 4K or higher and I don't think you can encode/export H265 yet. You also don't get noise reduction and some other effects, which may or may not be an issue for you. Studio also allows for collaborative editing and HDR editing, which again I don't think is an issue for many people either, considering that it's free. I don't think buying the Studio version is going to help your speed issues.

 

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Also to my knowledge there will be no performance difference if you pay for Resolve Studio unless you have a multiple GPU setup.

If you look at this blackmagicdesign feature comparison chart, the 10th row shows "H.264 accelerated encoding with hi-spec NVIDIA GPUs" (my adapter has a pascal architecture GPU, which according to a table on this page, has the hardware-accelerated encoding). This chart seems old (doesn't show H.265), but there seems to be a difference in processing in this regard between the two versions, which could help performance.

Or am I misinterpreting these indications?

Chris

 

[CanadaDrone]

If you look at this blackmagicdesign feature comparison chart, the 10th row shows "H.264 accelerated encoding with hi-spec NVIDIA GPUs" (my adapter has a pascal architecture GPU, which according to a table on this page, has the hardware-accelerated encoding). This chart seems old (doesn't show H.265), but there seems to be a difference in processing in this regard between the two versions, which could help performance.

Or am I misinterpreting these indications?

Chris

My understanding is that the color processing and some other effects are done through the GPU on both versions, but encoding/decoding is GPU accelerated on the Studio version only. So if you are having performance issues while editing, it might not help much. It should speed up encoding/decoding though if you have a compatible GPU. The Studio version also can use multiple GPUs, where the free version can't, but if you have multiple GPUs it will let you pick which one you want to use. I don't see an explicit list of what Blackmagic considers a "high spec" Nvidia GPU though - I would want to know that. Might be worth an email to DaVinci for clarity.