Last night I've done my first low light shoots and I've noticed that the footage is significantly noisy at 1600 iso f2.8 and shutter speed 30, comparing to other low light shoots with the p4p using the same camera settings they get nearly 0 noise and better color quality, what I'm doing wrong and how to improve the colors and lower the noise, I can't go under 1600iso at low light or everything will be pretty dark

Not much...  If you are shooting with the lens wide open, which you are, and you are shooting with the slowest shutter speed you can (which obviously can be no slower than the frame rate will allow) the only other variable in terms of image capture is your iso.  All you can do is shoot best quality, try not to under-expose and try and deal with noise in post.  You have to remember that the 1" (sic) sensor of the P4P is still quite small and has alot of very small pixels on it which mean that low light imaging is not its forte.

One alternative for you would be shoot timelapse instead of video, if you do this you can use much longer shutter speeds, even upto 2 secs, which obvoiusly gathers alot more light and can result in much more interesting video than "normal" video as you will get light streaks from car headlights etc.  But bear in mind you cannot combime time-lapse long exposure shooting with significant camera movement else you just get mush.

Probably not as noisy as the smaller sensor cameras (p3/p4).

KM5RG-Robert Posted at 2017-1-12 06:49
Probably not as noisy as the smaller sensor cameras (p3/p4).

Indeed although from a video perspective would have been alot better if DJI had used a sensor with less pixels, that said it is a good sensor for it's size. The P4 sensor is very noisy at high iso.

If you get to a better lit place (bigger city) with much more (brighter) lights it will look a whole lot better.  As was mentioned the sensor is not big and it is really not performing "bad" under circumstances.  Compare the sensor to a Sony A7S full frame, shooting at ISO 25000 at night...

birdingbilly Posted at 2017-1-12 07:49
Indeed although from a video perspective would have been alot better if DJI had used a sensor with less pixels, that said it is a good sensor for it's size. The P4 sensor is very noisy at high iso.

Yes the P4 Sensor on Auto at night will shoot wide open at its Max ISO which will have a lot of noise.  It's the same as the X3 in the Inspire.


You need to shoot in either D-Log or Color None and remove the noise in Post.

Premiere Pro CC 2017 has a few presets that remove the noise or you can do it manually.

Neat Video is a good noise reduction plugin too.

Thanks for the tip!

A second thumbs-up for Neat Video (I use plug-in for After Effects or VirtualDub). One-time cost of $75 per video editing package.

I use it even for videos shot in moderate light and it does a miraculous job of cleaning the noise and optionally adding natural-looking sharpening.

They have some samples on their website that show before/after comparisons on the same clip.

Neat Video

You can try the  white noise vs brown noise vs pink noise, after using that you get the best solution. I also tried this when I had noise problem. And I really very happy to use this. I think, you should try this , you get the best solution of your problem. Thanks.

P3S on a night flight. Maybe choose a part of the city with more street lighting.

Noise when shooting with high ISO is unavoidable, but you can minimize it by limiting sharpening that is done by P4P camera and use noise removal/sharpening in post production.

Increase light (or reduce sharpening, as stated in a previous reply). But really, depending on what video editor you use, there might be noise reduction features/plugins at your disposal. I use Neat Video and it works very well.