I've tested the "Battery Saver" vs "High Quality" mode.

I belive that "high quality" enables in-camera noise reduction processing, while "battery saver" disables the processing.

Unfortunately the processsing causes ghosting and smears details when movement occurs in the image.  
Even on ISO 100 the details are blurred when in high quality mode.  

For now I will stick with "battery saver" when possible to disable this processing, unless maybe shooting high iso shots at night with little motion.



The images below are stills taken from 4K 30p d-cinelike video, and panning the gimbal left to right with the stick to create motion.

I noticed this too with Pocket 2. I did not notice this effect with Pocket 1.

It looks like something that was not planned for by DJI.
Hope they find a fix for this.

So that was the cause of blurry motion artifact I noticed.
Great finding.

Tide Posted at 11-13 02:40
So that was the cause of blurry motion artifact I noticed.
Great finding.

You're welcome.  Thank you for your review, incredibly detailed.  

I'd be curious of your thoughts on this processing.

Presumably shutter speed was the same in each comparison?

fansfe82067d Posted at 11-13 03:58
Presumably shutter speed was the same in each comparison?

Yes.  Same exact settings apart from battery saver vs high quality.

This does also happen with the Osmo Pocket. There is less detail when in use. Look at the average bit rate using MediaInfo when in use. It drops every time. Basically a form of noise reduction means getting rid of sharp adjoining pixel noise and an amount of smoothing occurs due to this process. That and the extra heat is causes to build up means I very seldom use it and would prefer to de-noise in post.

Ron_H Posted at 11-13 03:48
You're welcome.  Thank you for your review, incredibly detailed.  

I'd be curious of your thoughts on this processing.

As Ray mentioned above, there was a long debate about stability of high quality mode and its processing since the Pocket 1 launched.

I personally didn't had any problem and seeing constantly good bitrate with high quality mode in Pocket 1.
But with Pocket 2, I definatly noticed pixel smearing happens in high detailed area like tree branches or ground textures.
So if no other suspect is on the horizon, I think it is good time to give a second look on the high quality mode.

Ray-CubeAce Posted at 11-13 04:23
This does also happen with the Osmo Pocket. There is less detail when in use. Look at the average bit rate using MediaInfo when in use. It drops every time. Basically a form of noise reduction means getting rid of sharp adjoining pixel noise and an amount of smoothing occurs due to this process. That and the extra heat is causes to build up means I very seldom use it and would prefer to de-noise in post.

I just looked into the bitrate of 400 4K shots I took for the review video.
Pocket 1 shots are over all in 85~100Mbps range regardless of the frame rate of the video.
(Except those extremely under exposed low light test shots with ISO100 which even lingering as low as 5 Mbps.)

However for Pocket 2....
Surprisingly, none of my 4K 24P and 30P "High quality" shots exceed 83Mbps...  
(Roughly 73~83Mbps range)

Only 4K 60P shots (which are not "High quality") are in 97~100Mbps range.


Even for heavily under exposed comparison shots walking under trees, Pocket 1maintained 100Mbps but Pocket 2 tops at 64Mbps.

I think there is something here.
I didn't took any "battery saver" 4K 24P, 30P shots to compare but suspicious.

Tide Posted at 11-13 05:07
I just looked into the bitrate of 400 4K shots I took for the review video.
Pocket 1 shots are over all in 85~100Mbps range regardless of the frame rate of the video.
(Except those extremely under exposed low light test shots with ISO100 which even lingering as low as 5 Mbps.)

Hi Tide.
I think it's the increase in photo-sites on the sensor that is the main culprit. Yes the sensor is larger but still more photo-sites per mm than the old one.
Smaller sized photo-sites means the light well saturation is quicker and less accurate due to it not being able to capture as many photons for a given exposure time. That can lead to increasing varying amounts of light captured by neighboring photo-sites and larger comparative variations to equalize by the smoothing logarithm. This still produces a 4K or whatever image but needs more correction and at the end of the day and means softer images and lower bit counts. This is the problem of reducing photo-site sizes rather than using larger sensors with the same amount of photo-sites.
The laws of physics can't be changed although manufacturers do try to improve signal noise by reducing signal pathways. But like for like, larger photo-sites win where noise is of a concern but lose out when it doesn't.
The results don't surprise me.

This is also possibly why there is still a limited exposure time. The photo-site light wells would oversaturate given more exposure time without the use of ND filters. On such a small sensor that would be self defeating in my personal view for such use.

Ray.

Hi Ron_H, sorry for the inconvenience caused. Could you please PM me the serial number of your Pocket 2? At the same time, please provide us with some original images for further analysis, you may upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, then share the link with me. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks.

DJI Natalia Posted at 11-14 03:22
Hi Ron_H, sorry for the inconvenience caused. Could you please PM me the serial number of your Pocket 2? At the same time, please provide us with some original images for further analysis, you may upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, then share the link with me. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks.

Hi.  My serial number is 3PYCHAH00A1954

Here the images and video examples
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1oKbok6SC220jtmoQTagxvD99_vp3zTR-?usp=sharing

Ron_H Posted at 11-14 05:56
Hi.  My serial number is 3PYCHAH00A1954

Here the images and video examples

Thanks for the information, I'll forward it to the related team for a check.

Hey,
when i shot a clip in 4k 30FPS with a pan of the camera i also had a lot of noise only during movement. I did again a clip in performance mode and battery saver to show the problem. I know the shutter speed was pretty high but that makes no differences to the result.

2

Mode: 4k 30 FPS Bitrate: 79749 kBit/s

1

Mode: 4k 30 FPS Bitrate: 78267 kBit/s

I think it is confirmed that there is a problem within the performance mode setting.

Just wanted to follow this thread and see where it goes. Side note: Is there a way on the DJI forum to subscribe to posts? I don't see any option for that, other than replying to a thread, which seems to subscribe you.

Thank you for confirming my suspicions! I've been doing multiple tests in both modes, have been getting the same bit rate no matter which mode I'm in, but "battery saver" has always been just a little sharper! I was wondering at first if it was using different methods of sampling the 64MP image down to 4K (pixel binning vs. oversampling), but it looks like your theory of noise reduction is actually what's happening!

I agree with all that said; but in my humble opinion the "high quality" examples posted here exhibit serious compression artifacts on top of (if not more than) the other problems like ghosting. Given the name, it should have been the other way around

What is the point of processing a video to higher quality (hoping that they succeed at it one day) if you cannot save it as good as an "unprocessed" one?

CemAygun Posted at 11-16 16:41
I agree with all that said; but in my humble opinion the "high quality" examples posted here exhibit serious compression artifacts on top of (if not more than) the other problems like ghosting. Given the name, it should have been the other way around

What is the point of processing a video to higher quality (hoping that they succeed at it one day) if you cannot save it as good as an "unprocessed" one?

I think DJI's view of the Pocket 2 was to give people a tool to produce ready-to-post media with minimal to no post-processing. Unless you have a good computer with a good video editing program, you're not going to have access to any video noise removal software. Thus, baking it into the device does give people the option to have relatively noise-free video straight out of camera.
I think where they went wrong was in their naming system. Instead of calling it "battery saver" vs. "High Quality," they should have just named it what it is "video noise reduction."

firefighter2009 Posted at 11-18 13:21
I think DJI's view of the Pocket 2 was to give people a tool to produce ready-to-post media with minimal to no post-processing. Unless you have a good computer with a good video editing program, you're not going to have access to any video noise removal software. Thus, baking it into the device does give people the option to have relatively noise-free video straight out of camera.
I think where they went wrong was in their naming system. Instead of calling it "battery saver" vs. "High Quality," they should have just named it what it is "video noise reduction."

Makes much more sense that way . I seriously doubt it is a simple 2D noise reduction though. I guess they utilize some sort of multiple pixel readout/bin algotrim; but it is not working as planned (hence the ghosting) and it is also hindering the compression...

Well, there is always the next firmware update to look forward to ...

1. Ron_H's blur issue
high quality won't do the blur stuff. The comparison might be the shoot is moving making the motion blur or focus changing. (u may do a still shoot comparison (using AFS) and see the result)

2. noise deduction.
High quality mode aims at improving visual quality of the footage. Noise deduction is one of process in high quality mode.
Any kind of noise deduction will lose some details.

The reason why batterysaving mode saves battery is because camera does less processing part.
If you are pursing a footage without so much post-processing, battery saving mode is the choice.
For people used to the nowadays smartphone footage，high quality does provide a visually better footage straight out from camera.

Thanks for the feedback and you guys figure it out in this thread discussion.
we will do with the tune of noise and detail balance in high quality mode.

DJI-ytao Posted at 11-19 18:59
1. Ron_H's blur issue
high quality won't do the blur stuff. The comparison might be the shoot is moving making the motion blur or focus changing. (u may do a still shoot comparison (using AFS) and see the result)

Also please look into the bitrate.
Currently 4K 24P and 30P didn't reach 100Mbps and remain around 80Mbps unlike Pocket 1.

Thank you and keep up to good work!

DJI-ytao Posted at 11-19 18:59
1. Ron_H's blur issue
high quality won't do the blur stuff. The comparison might be the shoot is moving making the motion blur or focus changing. (u may do a still shoot comparison (using AFS) and see the result)

The shutter speed in the outdoor comparison was 1/1600,  ISO 100, and there is no motion blur occurring or focus issues.  The blurring is definitely caused by the image processing and not any camera settings.  

The detail loss only occurs when processing movement, not on still video.  I suppose it is a tradeoff of trying to process video footage in real-time on such a device.  

Thanks for looking into it.

Tide Posted at 11-19 19:18
Also please look into the bitrate.
Currently 4K 24P and 30P didn't reach 100Mbps and remain around 80Mbps unlike Pocket 1.

Yes, I've noticed this as well.  
A higher bitrate at 100Mbps+ would be appreciated.

Good to know!

Hi, Thanks for posting this.
It is my first post here and I landed here because of my doubts about this setting.
I was going crazy trying to understand what was going on with the battery saver/high quality setting. I could hardly tell the difference, and often found myself liking more the battery saver one. This explains why.

On the same topic, have you noticed a substantial change of battery life between the two options?
I honestly couldn't, and this was driving me even crazier as I couldn't tell if there's something wrong with my sample.

My testing environment was static, on a tripod, with constant light, same settings (2.7k, 24fps) starting from 100% charged to dead battery. Both the battery saver mode and the high quality mode would give me pretty much the same recording time, but battery saver would give almost 4 times bigger files than High Quality (again, adding to my question mark face while looking at the data).

Can you guys confirm it is "normal" despite being weird?

Luca Petralia Posted at 1-2 09:46
Hi, Thanks for posting this.
It is my first post here and I landed here because of my doubts about this setting.
I was going crazy trying to understand what was going on with the battery saver/high quality setting. I could hardly tell the difference, and often found myself liking more the battery saver one. This explains why.

Well there is nothing normal in this camera. It's made with feet

I found battery saver are much sharper as well. But under both modes there are lots of motion artifacts. Details are the worst when you switch to 4K/48p or higher framerates.
For Pocket 1, the image quality is consistently better (at least less artifacts or daylight noises), barely any differences in any mode.

Nathan.L Posted at 1-2 12:07
I found battery saver are much sharper as well. But under both modes there are lots of motion artifacts. Details are the worst when you switch to 4K/48p or higher framerates.
For Pocket 1, the image quality is consistently better (at least less artifacts or daylight noises), barely any differences in any mode.

I'll have to try the battery saver option, and you're dead on about the quality at the high frame rates. 4K 60FPS is pretty much trash.

Got the Pocket 2 Creator Combo for Christmas.
Have had it out a few times and thought pictures and videos were great, until I ported them over to phone and computer, blurry and out of focus, even when on camera tripod.
Even tried the extension rod, same thing ...
So disappointed as was looking for something to film on the ground to cut with mavic pro in the air.

Could it be, that with the cost of this thing and the way it’s boosted by DJI, that it can’t easily take a blur/motion free picture / video ?

I think I’m going to return everything, it’s just not up to standard.
My osmo 3 and iPhone was shooting better clearer pictures and footage.

fans86a0b52b Posted at 1-4 15:12
Got the Pocket 2 Creator Combo for Christmas.
Have had it out a few times and thought pictures and videos were great, until I ported them over to phone and computer, blurry and out of focus, even when on camera tripod.
Even tried the extension rod, same thing ...

Check the lens for dust inside - there have been some instances of that reported.  Get it replaced if so.  Were you shooting in low light?  It is limited by its small sensor.  Are you sure you had continuous autofocus turned on?  Can you upload a sample of the problem footage to YouTube to be checked?

Hi, no dust in lens and acs was on.
Bit of video pumping happening too, all shot around 1pm GMT.
I’ve got in touch with DJI directly now to query this.
I’m sending them video and pictures.
Thanks, will update

You should update to the current firmware released today and see if they have quietly fixed the problem.  

fansfe82067d Posted at 1-6 03:58
You should update to the current firmware released today and see if they have quietly fixed the problem.

Does the newer firmware solves this problem or it still exist?   

Yes, I am having the same problem and wonder whether this problem existed in the previous firmware? Will it be possible to downgrade the firmware?

I too have noticed this problem. Regardless of ISO or shutter speed, the battery saver mode gives less blurry footage. This effect seems similar that some 64mpix quad bayer sensor smartphones have, when fast motion causes ghosting. This is likely fixable with alternative postprocessing methods, since not all 64mpix quad bayer smartphones have this.

DJI, you should probably rebrand this mode as "noise reduction on/off". I expect high quality mode to give me higher bitrate, and not blur the image or cause ghosting.  My suggestions would be
1) Introduce a separate "high bitrate mode" that gives at least consistent 100Mbps, maybe even higher if possible.
2) rename the high quality mode to "noise reduction on/off", maybe give users possibility of adjusting the strength of the noise reduction.
3) fix the ghosting of the noise reduction mode

So , what is best settings if you want slow slown video in 4k later?