"poster paint" footage .......what did I do?

Clearairturbulence · May 1, 2017

hi guys

Apologies in advance for the newb question.

Was filming today and I messed with the settings trying to get a really good shot. To my horror when I got home and reviewed footage it looked like I had applied some sort of photoshop like "poster edges" filter!,,

I quickly reset my camera settings using the go4 app and tested to reassure me it wasn't damaged in any way....this solved the problem but I'd love to know exactly what I pressed so I can avoid it in the future.

Thanks in advance

BorisTheSpider · May 1, 2017

Probably negative sharpening is my guess - on the mavic, you need to use in camera sharpening and not try to shoot flat with d-log and the like, cinelike seems to be as flat as you can get away with. There's no DR advantage in reducing contrast, you actually lose DR that way as well.

Clearairturbulence · May 1, 2017

Thanks Boris .... I did knock the sharpness down after watching other tutorials on YT. Their footage looked nothing like mine......did I simply go too far you think?

BorisTheSpider · May 1, 2017

It's actually been discussed at length here, but I made the same mistake as you when I first got the mavic.

Essentially, you may get away with 0 or -1 sharpening in certain cases, where the lighting is even, the contrast is not to high, and most importantly there's not much fine detail in the scene.

In most cases however, anything less than +1 sharpening will trigger horrendous over-the-top noise reduction which will smear all the fine detail out of your scene and make it look like a painting.

I'd generally say shoot +1, and if you really must go down to 0 sharpness only do it when you're really sure the scene is not demanding. You can always do a little Gaussian blur or use neat video or similar later to take the edge off the over sharpened look, but it's better than throwing away the detail forever by using low sharpening settings on the mavic.

That's the short version on sharpening. As for dynamic range, I can't remember where but I've seen a decent test done with the mavic where they showed you won't gain anything from reducing contrast and actually you throw away DR that would have been recorded with it set at zero. Even though the new d-log is less bad than the old, it's too flat and it's asking too much from a tiny sensor to try to shoot a log profile, normal or cinelike are where it's at, and I think art should be fine too but I've not tried that yet.

As for saturation, I've not seen much. It's probably less important and if you want more flexibility for grading using negative saturation is probably OK, again I've not tried, but I'd imagine it does give you a bit more room to color grade without such side effects that come with reducing sharpening or contrast.