I think that allot of us used to blame the Mavic Pro "smears" "clusters", "blobs" and "watercolor" effect on it's 60Mbp/s h.264 compression. Although, this certainly does add it's own problems, I think the "first" cause of the issue is
very crude temporal noise reduction processing. This Ambarella A9-
A1 image processor dates all the way back GoPro Hero 3! This camera had the exact same "smearing" that we see with the Mavic Pro. I think this A9-
A1 chip should have been taken off the market YEARS ago. Ambarella has since replaced it with at least two times with newer designs. Unfortunately DJI bought that chip for the Mavic Pro during the R&D phase and were stuck with it thereafter. DJI has even stated that as soon as the Mavic was finished, they went back to the drawing board
the very next day.
The Mavic Air today benefits from the same Ambarella H1 chip that the
Phantom 4 Pro uses. And, although it's still the same tiny noisy 1/2.3 sensor, the temporal noise reduction (noise identification process spanning across multiple frames) is FAR better and more efficient than that original A9-
A1 chip. in my years of careful noise reduction processing in post, that's what I see as more than half of the problem going on. When you create a bad noise print or profile, this is the effect that you get. Especially when you try to cancel it out too aggressively. You get "blobs" across multiple frames.
Yeah,...it's true that the Air's 100mbp/s sure helps the situation much more than that ridicules 60mbp/s did.
That A9-
A1 is 100% dead today. Is it possible that the Mavic Pro was the last imaging device to ever use it?
