Hi all... I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction so I can figure out what's happening here in this full-size crop from a recent Mavic flight and how I can avoid it in future...



I have earlier clips in the same session that look fine but for some reason a whole bunch that get this weird posterised effect which I can only describe as looking like excessive noise reduction or the colour range being dropped to the equivalent of a GIF!

If I remember right, this was shot in P mode with a Taco-RC ND8 (3 stops) filter in manual with low ISO (no more than 400), shutter speed was a moderate 100. The image above is a full size crop from the original 4K footage.

Any suggestions on what I need to consider to avoid this in future would be appreciated, thanks.

Reducing ISO to 200 or 100  (by using a weaker ND filter) would have helped, at least in my tests it did. Some users report increasing sharpness helps. Some say resetting camera helps (e.g. by NTSC <-> PAL switching). BTW, how did you create this full-size crop?

Nothing to do with iso afaik. Check your sharpness setting. Minus settings result in heavy noise reduction and this is what you are seening here.
In lowlight even 0 can give you this effect in darker parts of your picture. +1 gets rid of it completely (at least on my mavic) but introduces some noise.
I can control that noise much better in davinci than the internal NR though.

SrMi Posted at 2017-2-6 18:15
Reducing ISO to 200 or 100  (by using a weaker ND filter) would have helped, at least in my tests it did. Some users report increasing sharpness helps. Some say resetting camera helps (e.g. by NTSC  PAL switching). BTW, how did you create this full-size crop?

Thanks, ISO was already low but I'll try a reset.  To create the sample I just screeen-grabbed the footage (ctrl+print screen on Windows) at full size and cropped the pasted file in Photoshop.

CaptainFantasti Posted at 2017-2-6 23:33
Nothing to do with iso afaik. Check your sharpness setting. Minus settings result in heavy noise reduction and this is what you are seening here.
In lowlight even 0 can give you this effect in darker parts of your picture. +1 gets rid of it completely (at least on my mavic) but introduces some noise.
I can control that noise much better in davinci than the internal NR though.

Thanks, this sounds plausible... I'm shooting in Cinelike mode with contrast, saturation and sharpness all at -2.  Curiously however, these reduced settings HAVE resulted in some pretty usable log-colour kind of files but then I get this crazy effect seemingly at random half way through some 'clean' footage.

When the conditions are right even -3 can look ok but then sometimes you just have to pan 90degrees and everything is mush.
The settings for color&contrast and even the color profile have nothing to do with it afaik.
Since i stick to +1 and do some NR in post i haven't had this problem anymore.

Thanks, good to know, I'll keep experimenting.