Poor video quality from my new Mavic

Tigger_81 · Aug 7, 2017

Hi Pilots.

Last week I got my first Mavic and I really happy over the quality of this product. For me this is small transformer

But I'm very dissapointed about camera. I tried 4k and 2,7k and 1080p also and I see a lot of aliasing in video. I tried orginal SDCard (Sandisk) and Lexar (from Phantom 3 Pro) and in my opinion somenthing is definetlly wrong with video quality. I see lot of grainy video and big aliasing.
I have Phantom 3 Pro and quality from it is much much better than Mavic

Could you help me please in this? Below are links to orginal footage.

ISO is 100.

Setting - auto, color - none, style default (0,0,0). 2,7K
Dropbox - DJI_0025.MP4

Setting - auto, color - Cinelike, style Custom(-2,0,0) - 4K
Dropbox - DJI_0004.MP4

Jason367 · Aug 7, 2017

Thank god I'm not the only one, I also bought mine last week. I'm pretty peeved about the quality, here is a screen grab of 100iso 2.7k standing still 30fps +1 -1 -1, manual mode with manual WB, with Polar pro Cp filter, in D-Cinematic. I find the picture is not sharp enough at all. Hopefully someone can shed light on the issue!

RaRaRasputin · Aug 7, 2017

Tigger_81 said:
Hi Pilots.

Last week I got my first Mavic and I really happy over the quality of this product. For me this is small transformer
But I'm very dissapointed about camera. I tried 4k and 2,7k and 1080p also and I see a lot of aliasing in video. I tried orginal SDCard (Sandisk) and Lexar (from Phantom 3 Pro) and in my opinion somenthing is definetlly wrong with video quality. I see lot of grainy video and big aliasing.
I have Phantom 3 Pro and quality from it is much much better than Mavic

Could you help me please in this? Below are links to orginal footage.

ISO is 100.

Setting - auto, color - none, style default (0,0,0). 2,7K
Dropbox - DJI_0025.MP4

Setting - auto, color - Cinelike, style Custom(-2,0,0) - 4K
Dropbox - DJI_0004.MP4

Try settings for video +1 sharpness, -1 contrast and -1 saturation
Shoot in D-Cinelike or D-Log (correct colours in post later)
Use an ND filter to get shutter speed down to sub 100 (ideally twice frame rate if wanting good cinematic effect with motion blur)

RaRaRasputin · Aug 7, 2017

Jason367 said:
Thank god I'm not the only one, I also bought mine last week. I'm pretty peeved about the quality, here is a screen grab of 100iso 2.7k standing still 30fps +1 -1 -1, manual mode with manual WB, with Polar pro Cp filter, in D-Cinematic. I find the picture is not sharp enough at all. Hopefully someone can shed light on the issue!

Screen grabs from a video will most times include some motion blur if your shutter speed is sub 100, which is what you want to do when shooting video.

You certainly want to do some post processing on D-Cinelike and D-Log to bring out the details (contrast/clarity) which will in turn bring depth and sharpness to the details.

Tigger_81 · Aug 7, 2017

RaRaRasputin said:
Try settings for video +1 sharpness, -1 contrast and -1 saturation
Shoot in D-Cinelike or D-Log (correct colours in post later)
Use an ND filter to get shutter speed down to sub 100 (ideally twice frame rate if wanting good cinematic effect with motion blur)

I'll try to do this but I think, when I increase sharpness aliasing and grainy will be stronger. I know about ND filters but this is not solution for grainy footages.

As I mentioned - I have Phantom 3 Pro from 2 years and I can easily compare footage from Mavic and Phantom. Footager from Mavic looks like ISO800 or more but was only 100.

4wd · Aug 7, 2017

+1 sharpness idea is best with 2.7K only
for 4K D-Log all on zero is OK if you can do some grading.
Cinelike and None can work quite well but I've found rather variable results - less easily sorted in post than D-Log

Lake_Flyer · Aug 7, 2017

It seems you didn't focus first. At least from the beginning it is unsharp and stays that way. Normally you would focus and you normally can see that happening in the footage. You always need to focus with the Mavic. Yesterday I forgot and half of my footage (up till the moment I discovered it and focussed) looks just as blurry as yours. Overall, Sharpness +1 and 0's for the rest seems to work fine with the .900 firmware. Also with 4K, in my case. ISO 200 with an ND16.

Here are 2 snapshots in 4K before and after focussing. Low light, manual, had to set shutter to 1/25, so not optimal. But the focused part is quite OK, no aliasing and no water colouring.

Tigger_81 · Aug 7, 2017

I understand all those advice, but in my opinion something is wrong with camera, because so much grain in video is not acceptable. First video I've posted DJI_0025.MP4 is on default settings and it is terrible.

I know that a can set some color grading or sharpness or saturation but I this this is not about this topic - when the basic footage is awful any correction would not fix this problem. I compared my footage from phantom 3 pro with default settings, no ND filters, no post production to my Mavic footage - and Phantom 3 is like Mercedes...Mavic is like.......bike.

Can anyone could download DJI_0025 from my first post and say if should I send my Mavic for repair?

Tigger_81 · Aug 7, 2017

Hi Masheen,

Thanks for you reply. I did tap to focus, but i think that you talking about DJI_0004 video. This is with sharpness = -2 so this video is blurry, but even that you can notice lot of aliasing on vertical and horizontal lines (especialy on buildings).

I'll try with sharpness +1 and I'll you know.

Tigger_81 · Aug 7, 2017

Today I had (and many others people too) problem with my Android DJI GO application..downgrade to 4.1.3 and now it's pretty stable.

Anyway - tried footage with sharpness +1 and I think this is still not good enought.
This is very short movie (I don't want to put this on youtube because youtube has too many filters making video softer).

What do you think? I tried in 4K and it's even worse.

Dropbox - grainy_video_mavic_.mp4

Mr. Salty · Aug 7, 2017

Tigger_81 said:
What do you think? I tried in 4K and it's even worse.

Dropbox - grainy_video_mavic_.mp4

I think you're "pixel peeping." When you zoom in to a small part of the frame with a small-sensor camera you're going to see grain. You were zoomed in to less than a quarter of the frame.

Beth T · Jun 2, 2020

This is an old thread but I just picked up the mavic 2 zoom a few months back and i'm also getting really bad quality footage. I have seen so many videos with incredible footage and yes I know a lot of that was done in post with gading etc but the original footage shouldn't be this noisy at 4k. Did anyone find a solution? I have been through numerous settings and still can't seem to get it to actually look 4k

lannes · Jun 2, 2020

The video doesn't look "noisy" on my computer with a 4k monitor, it actually looks 4k and very sharp.
If you view it at 1080p it's a bit soft due to the lower resolution

What system are you using to view the video ?

Beth T · Jun 2, 2020

lannes said:
The video doesn't look "noisy" on my computer with a 4k monitor, it actually looks 4k and very sharp.
If you view it at 1080p it's a bit soft due to the lower resolution

What system are you using to view the video ?

thanks for looking, I uploaded another clip that is a bit longer which i'm hoping looks 4k too. I don't have a 4k monitor so obviously I won't get what you are seeing but it has been viewed on a 4k monitor and the quality still not looking great, bit confused

Imnotsure_YT · Jun 2, 2020

What is the drone model? If it is mavic pro that model has quite some issues.

lannes · Jun 3, 2020

Beth T said:
thanks for looking, I uploaded another clip that is a bit longer which i'm hoping looks 4k too. I don't have a 4k monitor so obviously I won't get what you are seeing but it has been viewed on a 4k monitor and the quality still not looking great, bit confused

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This video is not as sharp as the previous one, it could be a little over exposed due to the sky.

Also try shooting at 24fps 4k instead of the 60fps

What are your settings for sharpness, contrast and saturation ?
Try not to go higher than +1 for sharpness and maybe bump up the saturation a bit.

Beth T · Jun 3, 2020

Imnotsure_YT said:
What is the drone model? If it is mavic pro that model has quite some issues.

it is the mavic 2 zoom

Beth T · Jun 3, 2020

lannes said:
This video is not as sharp as the previous one, it could be a little over exposed due to the sky.

Also try shooting at 24fps 4k instead of the 60fps

What are your settings for sharpness, contrast and saturation ?
Try not to go higher than +1 for sharpness and maybe bump up the saturation a bit.

Already shoot at 24fps 4k (this footage is all at 24fps)
settings are at +1, 0, 0