yep the camera on mavic has to many problems to be considered matching the drone and price...yellow spot in center, NR kicking hard and rendering video very poor, impossible to use for video 1080 resolution...frequent shaking gimbal...frequent sensor/lens misalignment   this is the reality...for the 1080 part the dji does wrong because they should state from the start that it is for googles only and not filming. Also they should optimize more before launching the camera and lens to rid out the yellow spot and to do a better qc control....for misalignment...an for other problems...a lot of mavics came with some sort of factory malfunction or shipping damage. MY mavic like on others had the plastic body deformed in 2-3 places on top front part like some finger over pressure or heat deformed depressions...now when I put some glossy skin on it it is more visible. Bun all in all for what it is and what it offer I am happy with it but not so  cheerful about dji...they should do better until the end, when they created and designed such good device...now they only loose respect on their hand. Mentioned also the wast delay of shipping the product?

rydfree41 Posted at 2017-2-25 13:41
I've never had a problem with the water color effect but after reading this entire thread I have noticed my friend's Inspire did look funny when I took a pic of it !
.
.

Dude those pics cannot be for real. They are just too bad. I know the camera on the mavic is bad but it's not that bad. Everything in your pictures is like water paint... are you messing with us.

Just want to confirm that reset of PAL and shooting in 2,7K 30fps gave much much better effect. But the yellow spot - its terrible. Now I see it even on iphone screen.

Hey all,

I recently had to ship my Mavic off for repair and I made a quick video about the entire process.
Documenting emails, procedure and timescales.





Hopefully it may be of interest to some.
I had a camera/sensor issue which started with what's mentioned here, oil painting lack of focus etc onto the final problem.
In the video is a link to the actual footage I had to send to DJI before they'd even look at the Mavic.


Thanks,

-Aidan

alirz5 Posted at 2017-2-25 20:06
Dude those pics cannot be for real. They are just too bad. I know the camera on the mavic is bad but it's not that bad. Everything in your pictures is like water paint... are you messing with us.

No that's a REAL water color ,lol

I Just finished a project  (Latest firmware Art. -1,-1, 0). The shots are immaculate. The footage is perfect. Lots of trees. No mush. No water colour. Focus stunning. Truly incredible definition. Minimal Post and it's superb.  The problem is this. From experience I know full well that I could land The Mavic. Power down. Walk 100 yards up the field. Re boot it and it the results would be totally different. I know this because it's happened to me and numerous others on this and other forums. Anyone who works with computers or cameras or software is prepared to accept that they have glitches. Getting to know that there are tricks & work arounds that you need to employ to get results. mastering these techniques is part of the skill. Otherwise everyone could do it. The problem with this piece of kit is that the issues that occur are totally random, unpredictable and seemingly impossible to forecast or replicate. As an operator If you can't replicate it, you can't fix it. I don't expect it to be out of the box perfect. Regarding ease of use It's the Canon / Nikon argument. I'd go Nikon every time because I want to master the setup. I've not contacted DJI because I'm too busy running my business which in which I'd hoped the Mavic could be employed but I can't trust it to yield predictable results in it's present state. The stories on the forums where users have come back from foreign trips with unusable footage is really, really bad for the Company. All the promo vids on the website now appear a little ... jaded. If the manufacturer could let us know officially (No offence Ken)  that this was being addressed it would mean a lot and I would suggest that the place to start is in my example. "Walk 100 yards up the field. Re boot it and it the results would be totally different". ........ "Reboot" .. It's not the hardware..  

fansdb6ff1f7 Posted at 2017-2-27 03:58
I Just finished a project  (Latest firmware Art. -1,-1, 0). The shots are immaculate. The footage is perfect. Lots of trees. No mush. No water colour. Focus stunning. Truly incredible definition. Minimal Post and it's superb.  The problem is this. From experience I know full well that I could land The Mavic. Power down. Walk 100 yards up the field. Re boot it and it the results would be totally different. I know this because it's happened to me and numerous others on this and other forums. Anyone who works with computers or cameras or software is prepared to accept that they have glitches. Getting to know that there are tricks & work arounds that you need to employ to get results. mastering these techniques is part of the skill. Otherwise everyone could do it. The problem with this piece of kit is that the issues that occur are totally random, unpredictable and seemingly impossible to forecast or replicate. As an operator If you can't replicate it, you can't fix it. I don't expect it to be out of the box perfect. Regarding ease of use It's the Canon / Nikon argument. I'd go Nikon every time because I want to master the setup. I've not contacted DJI because I'm too busy running my business which in which I'd hoped the Mavic could be employed but I can't trust it to yield predictable results in it's present state. The stories on the forums where users have come back from foreign trips with unusable footage is really, really bad for the Company. All the promo vids on the website now appear a little ... jaded. If the manufacturer could let us know officially (No offence Ken)  that this was being addressed it would mean a lot and I would suggest that the place to start is in my example. "Walk 100 yards up the field. Re boot it and it the results would be totally different". ........ "Reboot" .. It's not the hardware..

I tried this reboot the camera to PAL and back to NTSC suggestion yesterday and couldn't tell a difference. Has anyone captured video before and after switching that demonstrates the effect?

I rather suspect the issue has more to do with the ambient light level than anything else -- when there's strong lighting, the camera stack does an admirable job for what it is, in low light, it does the best it can.

That said, maybe my camera is just working properly.

so what is DJI doing what the update they keep deleting  my post !

Question about this whole watercolor issue.  Did you guys see the issue right out of the box or did it happen over time?

Ex Machina Posted at 2017-2-28 14:53
I tried this reboot the camera to PAL and back to NTSC suggestion yesterday and couldn't tell a difference. Has anyone captured video before and after switching that demonstrates the effect?

I rather suspect the issue has more to do with the ambient light level than anything else -- when there's strong lighting, the camera stack does an admirable job for what it is, in low light, it does the best it can.

Exactly my experience. Ambient light or poor light conds outside make this effect more visible.
And also I can confirm if you don't touch the sharpness setting and stay at 0, it is better till the moment you set it for -1 for the first time. Then returning to 0 doesn't(!) work. Only the soft reset of the camera can help again (no matter if you do it via "reset all camera settings" or swith to PAL/NTSC and back - the second option I see as better since it doesn't delete all cam settings, just hot-restarts the camera).
It's clear that watercolor issue is caused by heavy post-processing in the Mavic internal SW, (NR & smoothening) visible at JPGs.
E.g. look at DNGs (Adobe RAWs) they all have significant vignette (darker corners) - this is a HW limitation of poor optics. But JPGs don't have vignettes - this meens Mavic DOES a lot of processing when shooting/filming. This is also connected with the red hot spot visible at JPGs / yellow warm center area at MGPs vids - all more visible under the poor light conds. So from my point of view, SW is trying to do the best to correct HW deficiences what are (known but from the marketing point of wiew yet) hidden to public.

I also suspect a bit the Adobe influence here. DNG is their standard (e.g. Nikon doesn't use DNGs), and embding this type of processing into HW (DJI and others) producers' FW makes great connection, doesn't it? You can go and buy AdobeLightroom and get many plug-ins (patches) for vignette correction, red hot spot corrections, and more! (Available specially for Phantom 3, 4, maybe for Mavic soon). And guess what (!?) - you can get rid of all these issues at once (!) by a sipmle click "apply patch" to the batch of DNG images (works also for Mavic red-hot spot and watercolor!) - sounds like a pure miracle, what you think? :-)

came across a video on youtube. Sure the lighting conditions are bad. But damn, look at all the water color effect. Trees, building everything.

alirz5 Posted at 2017-3-1 17:12
came across a video on youtube. Sure the lighting conditions are bad. But damn, look at all the water color effect. Trees, building everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBm_lSYarOU

That looks like an esthetic treatment, none of my lower light video looks remotely like that.

It's exactly the kind of "aesthetic treatment" my footage gets with -3 sharpening ;-)

Ex Machina Posted at 2017-3-1 20:20
That looks like an esthetic treatment, none of my lower light video looks remotely like that.

Well mine do actually .

At first I was pretty skeptical of the results in this thread (mainly because it was being borderline spammed)... but after some hour of testing I can conclusively say there is a noticeable difference in quality going from NTSC to PAL, which effectively "resets" the camera. Zooming in 100% there is noticeably less denoising/water color effect and small details appear much better. If you're not a pixel peeper, or photographer you will probably not notice this.
However, the water color issue is still somewhat there. I don't think we'll every fully get rid of it, simply due to the limitations of the camera's max bitrate which is 60Mbps. For those non geeks... 60mbps is very low for 4k. In fact if you go any lower it's unusable, so we're at the low end of 4k quality. Essentially the camera needs to compress each frame dramatically so it can fit the max bitrate, and the "watercoloring" is a side effect of this issue.
If DJI is reading this thread (which I hope) there are still possibilities to improve the camera given the current hardware limitations. If we lower the video framerate, you should allow less compression to dramatically improve image quality. 2.7K also should have MUCH better quality than it currently does, given it's lower bandwidth from 4k. Hopefully this is being looked into.

alirz5 Posted at 2017-3-2 03:24
Well mine do actually .

If my raw video looked like that example at default settings, I'd send my Mavic in for service.

Ex Machina Posted at 2017-3-2 11:17
If my raw video looked like that example at default settings, I'd send my Mavic in for service.

There is no raw video in the mavic.

@Mir The bitrate is not the problem here. It's the internal Noise Reduction. I've filmed very complex scenes where there are almost no solid areas where the codec/compression can work with. Those are good because you don't give the noise reduction a chance to kick in.
But i would really like if they could up the 2.7k mode from 40 to 60Mb/s anyway.

CaptainFantasti Posted at 2017-3-2 12:39
There is no raw video in the mavic.

@Mir The bitrate is not the problem here. It's the internal Noise Reduction. I've filmed very complex scenes where there are almost no solid areas where the codec/compression can work with. Those are good because you don't give the noise reduction a chance to kick in.

Lower-case raw, meaning not graded, filtered, or otherwise processed in post.

Mir Posted at 2017-3-2 10:40
At first I was pretty skeptical of the results in this thread (mainly because it was being borderline spammed)... but after some hour of testing I can conclusively say there is a noticeable difference in quality going from NTSC to PAL, which effectively "resets" the camera. Zooming in 100% there is noticeably less denoising/water color effect and small details appear much better. If you're not a pixel peeper, or photographer you will probably not notice this.
However, the water color issue is still somewhat there. I don't think we'll every fully get rid of it, simply due to the limitations of the camera's max bitrate which is 60Mbps. For those non geeks... 60mbps is very low for 4k. In fact if you go any lower it's unusable, so we're at the low end of 4k quality. Essentially the camera needs to compress each frame dramatically so it can fit the max bitrate, and the "watercoloring" is a side effect of this issue.
If DJI is reading this thread (which I hope) there are still possibilities to improve the camera given the current hardware limitations. If we lower the video framerate, you should allow less compression to dramatically improve image quality. 2.7K also should have MUCH better quality than it currently does, given it's lower bandwidth from 4k. Hopefully this is being looked into.

I can conclusively say there is a noticeable difference in quality going from NTSC to PAL, which effectively "resets" the camera. Zooming in 100% there is noticeably less denoising/water color effect and small details appear much better. If you're not a pixel peeper, or photographer you will probably not notice this.

Are you sure you are not noticing differences in frame rate? IOW, did you compare 25fps/4K/PAL to 30fps/4K/NTSC?

I know in broadcast TV PAL is a bit higher resolution than NTSC, but I'm not sure this is applicable in a digital context.

Mir Posted at 2017-3-2 10:40
At first I was pretty skeptical of the results in this thread (mainly because it was being borderline spammed)... but after some hour of testing I can conclusively say there is a noticeable difference in quality going from NTSC to PAL, which effectively "resets" the camera. Zooming in 100% there is noticeably less denoising/water color effect and small details appear much better. If you're not a pixel peeper, or photographer you will probably not notice this.
However, the water color issue is still somewhat there. I don't think we'll every fully get rid of it, simply due to the limitations of the camera's max bitrate which is 60Mbps. For those non geeks... 60mbps is very low for 4k. In fact if you go any lower it's unusable, so we're at the low end of 4k quality. Essentially the camera needs to compress each frame dramatically so it can fit the max bitrate, and the "watercoloring" is a side effect of this issue.
If DJI is reading this thread (which I hope) there are still possibilities to improve the camera given the current hardware limitations. If we lower the video framerate, you should allow less compression to dramatically improve image quality. 2.7K also should have MUCH better quality than it currently does, given it's lower bandwidth from 4k. Hopefully this is being looked into.

I do 100% agree that 60mbs is too low for 4K but this isn't causing the issue with water colour/ noise reduction at all.

............

I just received my Mavic on Wednesday and this is the first day to really test it out. The video is really amazing and sharp, however the pictures are atrocious. Its strange since you would think it would be identical. Here is a screenshot of a video which ended and then I took a picture. This is 1080p/30fps. It's not even the higher settings and you can see definition in the trees and roof line. The colors are also better. The picture looks like the 320x240 camera Ken mentioned a couple of pages back. The trees are mud and looks like it was taken with a potato

[img]https://forum22.djicdn.com/data/attachment/forum/%5Burl=http://imgur.com/oSB06Mt%5D[/url

]

Mavic Driver Posted at 2017-3-4 13:24
I just received my Mavic on Wednesday and this is the first day to really test it out. The video is really amazing and sharp, however the pictures are atrocious. Its strange since you would think it would be identical. Here is a screenshot of a video which ended and then I took a picture. This is 1080p/30fps. It's not even the higher settings and you can see definition in the trees and roof line. The colors are also better. The picture looks like the 320x240 camera Ken mentioned a couple of pages back. The trees are mud and looks like it was taken with a potato

[view_image][/url

You are comparing processed video to unprocessed RAW image data. If you change settings to RAW+JPG you'll see that the JPG version has been processed to look more like what you see in video.

RAW files are for photogs that want to use their own processing tools and preferences for color, contrast, sharpening, noise reduction, etc., and depending on the RAW image viewer/editor, there may be no sharpening dialed in at all by default.

Thank you for your response Ex Machina. I actually started in Jpeg since that was the default setting. Below is an example of what sent me into the settings trying to find a resolution:

Video Capture:
[img]https://forum22.djicdn.com/data/attachment/forum/%5Bimg%5D[/img]

Photo:
http://imgur.com/vnDFhZOhttp://i.imgur.com/vnDFhZO.jpg

I realize there is work to be done after the photo is taken, but there seems to be a stark contrast from video sharpness and photo sharpness. And are you saying with enough post processing that the photo can achieve the same sharpness as the video capture?

Actually, after studying the last two examples which were Jpegs, they appear to be closer than I thought. I will try again tomorrow and may adjust the style settings to what folks are suggesting.

Mavic Driver Posted at 2017-3-4 20:08
Thank you for your response Ex Machina. I actually started in Jpeg since that was the default setting. Below is an example of what sent me into the settings trying to find a resolution:

Video Capture:

Yeah, in general you can expect a still to be of higher quality than a video frame-grab. In practice, sometimes frame-grabs or default jpgs are good enough.

SO DJI where is this fix ???   why you dragging your PROPS with this FIX???   

You need to shoot DNG. The JPGs are unusable, overly compressed, missing all detail. Even deforming some parts.

yes jpgs are awful dng it is the way... 50 times better...rely could make them look like was done by almost an dslr....dji real time processing software in mavic and phantom4 for video and photo at this moment are rely bad...they need serious work from programmers because it is a let down and a pity for the most famous company and with biggest sales...

100pct crops

Mavic from a friend:


My magic under same circumstances


Only difference here I was shooting in D-log, he was shooting in ART

100pct crops

Mavic from a friend:
http://i.imgur.com/HPD6ejE.png

My magic under same circumstances
http://i.imgur.com/rTnHnRC.png

Only difference here I was shooting in D-log, he was shooting in ART

fans117f42ed Posted at 2017-3-12 10:51
100pct crops

Mavic from a friend:

Are you serious. That is a big difference between the two!!!

fans117f42ed Posted at 2017-3-12 10:51
100pct crops

Mavic from a friend:

What does yours look like with the default video setting? Did you have sharpening turned down?

Mavic Driver Posted at 2017-3-4 20:08
Thank you for your response Ex Machina. I actually started in Jpeg since that was the default setting. Below is an example of what sent me into the settings trying to find a resolution:

Video Capture:

That is what i have noticed also, a frame grab from a videoclip shot in 4k is much better in quality than a photo taken from the same spot.

After the last update, this happened gradually on my first flight, i had ND16 filter on at the time, the camera could not focus at all and the watercolor effect came to this awful state.
I landed and first thought the filter was clogged due to temperature differences but it looked fine, turned off the drone and removed the filter, and things were back to normal, i later put on another ND filter and that didn`t alter the image quality at all. so i guess the restart of the camera did the trick. Here is the photo i took.
Here is link to same picture in raw: https://www.dropbox.com/s/00b3fzcyj2izr9t/DJI_0250.DNG?dl=0

i also get that pasterized-water painted image in videos at 50 & 60fps....2 short clips straight from the sd card if you wanna check> https://we.tl/mrKdZi5klH
videos at those fps are totally unusable...

Nothing to do with framerates... (high framerates are for the first person view googles anyway)

CaptainFantasti Posted at 2017-3-30 07:44
Nothing to do with framerates... (high framerates are for the first person view googles anyway)

i thought high framerate is for applying slow motion or shoot fast paced objects etc...at 24-25fps 2.7 and 4K image is ok

noipego Posted at 2017-3-30 07:57
i thought high framerate is for applying slow motion too...at 24-25fps 2.7 and 4K image is ok

Lots of threads already on the forum. The 48+ fps is there for the goggles. It aliases over 30.

Its as simple as this :  DJI has a real bad NR applied to the video PERIOD !   The sensor is small and gives bad noise .  This is probably why DJI hasn’t give any statements or workaround or FIX as if they did we all would be bitching about the high noise in all our video.   I do find it frustrating and sad how DJI and all the rest of the DJI powers of ego can’t simply address this issue with all the complaints and time spent on testing via US the people who put $$ in DJI’s bank account!     DJI could care less about this as if they did they would have fixed this issue or at least come up with a happy middle ground with the noise and NR used. The frame rate has NOT A DARN TOOTING THING to do with this water color issue. NOR does your ND filters it only one thing  NOISE REDUCTION FILTER !!!  that is the culprit here with the water color issue. I found this to be 100000000% fact as I had my blue ray player by accident NR setting pushed to +15 by and was amazed how similar the trees were looking in movies (watercolor) I then noticed that my setting again was wrong after I fixed it and set  the NR to 0 it was perfect    this is the same  that we have going on here…………… NR    drop mike !