Hi all,

I'm having a strange issue with my mavic pro. During my latest flight i noticed the footage is very blurry over a section of forest road. Everything on the road is sharp and ok, but the foliage is blurry as hell. What can be the issue? I'm shooting in 4k, 24fps, 1/50 iso 400, nd16 filter. Camera settings are 0, -1, 0. I've heard that anything under +1 sharpness activates an internal dji noise reduction mechanism, can this be the problem? I don't like oversharpened video, that's why i stuck with 0. I had a spark before the mavic and never had such issues, maybe it's some of my settings, i'm still getting used to shooting in manual.


Thanks for any input.

You should expect noise reduction artifacts in underexposed footage.

So there's no way to turn off the noise reduction? I would prefer to do it manually in post.

kkennyy Posted at 1-18 10:31
So there's no way to turn off the noise reduction? I would prefer to do it manually in post.

Basically you have to find a 'sweet spot' by reducing the frame rate to 30/25 and the shutter to 60/50 depending USA/EU. By adding a very small level of image sharpening, it stops the temporal anti-aliasing from being too notable - essentially you are trying to keep the data rate as is read off the capture chip to as low as possible but at the same time sharpening the spacial noise (low light noise) to stop the low contrast temporal antialiasing kicking in. Green/brown coloured areas are the most noticeable with this temporal and spacial antialiasing as these are most prominent areas of color when shooting the natural environment. You will also notice an 8 frame jump on the low contrast areas as the data compression on this capture chip is builtin - so happens before the data stream gets into DJI's video encoding pipeline.

We really cannot make any clear diagnosis on that single shot. You need to upload a short piece of original footage onto Dropbox so we can look at it.

This is the shot in question: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e1ju1cucloaezwy/DJI_0084_extract.MP4?dl=0

This is the full edited clip, you can notice many more:

So i was expecting this behaviour beacuse it was a dark valley and it was close to sunset, so there were spots of light all over, which looks great but i wasn't expecting to be quite so bad on the shadows.

Today i shot in similar conditions but with +1 sharpness and the issue is gone. I guess i'll have to use this setting and then do some noise reduction in post.

To better illustrate, here is another sample taken today:

0 sharpness, -1 contrast.


+1 sharpness, 0 contrast, original video.


+1 sharpness, 0 contrast, video denoise in powerdirector.


I think this last one is the winner

It seems you've found an answer.