My Gopro 10 is almost broken, so I got the Action 4. I do daily travel vlogs and the low light quality of the Action 4 really disappoints me in low light. When the sun is shining it's good. I mostly use an external LED (with my GoPro 10 together this combination always got me high quality videos).

First I didn't use an external LED on my Action 4 and I activated both night / low light improvement options. I was shocked about how bad the quality was and I thought that I made a mistake by choosing that lowlight improvement settings even though it wasn't night time. Especially my face looks so soft, blurry and without almost any details and it looks a bit more white. The next night I used the external light and I deactivated both low light improvement settings. I film with 1080p with both cameras. Video stabilization on. With the GoPro I filmed with the same settings at day AND night.
Here you can see a comparison. I'm really sad about this result, cause I want to keep my good quality videos, what at the moment is not possible with the Action 4. I feel kinda helpless now and don't know what to do. Right now I don't want to film with my Action 4 anymore at night, cause the Gopro does a much better job (as you can see in the attached pictures).

I uploaded all the comparison pictures here (please mind every picture's description). Also I put all the pictures from my video footage also to my Google Drive. I suppose it's a bit more organized there than here in the forum:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1x6jkpQxB9AFL29ouvwlrVG00Hv3tnbgo?usp=sharing

I appreciate every help and feedback.
Cheers!

Choose Pro in settings on right menu and there you can set your own sharpness and noise reduction.
Try out what you feel gives the best result. You could try +1 on sharpness and 0 noise reduction.

Out of curiosity, which external LED are you using?

To answer your question, I use the D-Log-M feature and then edit after.  This captures quite a bit in dark environments in my opinion where there are shadows.
What ISO, frame rate and shutter speed do you have your Action 4 at during these resordings?  You can't rely on the Auto feature at any point for any of the shots you have posted here.
AUTO anything is only good for daylight outdoors in my opinion.

Anonymous1 Posted at 11-4 11:33
Out of curiosity, which external LED are you using?

To answer your question, I use the D-Log-M feature and then edit after.  This captures quite a bit in dark environments in my opinion where there are shadows.

Thanks for your reply!
How long does the editing take for you when filming with D-Log-M? All my settings are Auto. Any ideas how to adjust these settings for night or low light videos with the LED? (I use the Ulanzi VL49 RBG).

johansenfoto Posted at 11-3 15:46
Choose Pro in settings on right menu and there you can set your own sharpness and noise reduction.
Try out what you feel gives the best result. You could try +1 on sharpness and 0 noise reduction.

Thanks for replying. But doesn't the sharpness just adds a digital sharpness to the videos? Same as if I add sharpness later with my editing software?

kaylee471 Posted at 11-4 12:34
Thanks for your reply!
How long does the editing take for you when filming with D-Log-M? All my settings are Auto. Any ideas how to adjust these settings for night or low light videos with the LED? (I use the Ulanzi VL49 RBG).

I also use the Ulanzi VL49.  The issue I have with it is that it doesn't shine  much further than an arm's length away to fully illuminate the area.  It is a good light to illustrate a face or the thing you are recording close up.  It doesn't have a wide enough beam to illuminate anything that is not in the very center of the shot.

This for ME raises a problem I have with the Action 4 that I don't have with the GoPro.
The Action 4 seems to do a center-weighted exposure, whereas the GoPro gives you the option of determining if you want the exposure of the entire scene and not just the portion of the center for its auto adjustments.

The Action4 has such a wide field of view that anything not near the center isn't exposed properly in low light conditions.  That's just been my experience.  I have to keep reminding myself that it is still an action camera.

Editing only takes a few seconds if using DJI's posted LUT to make things vibrant with a minor tweak with the "S" curves, or a few minutes if doing it from scratch depending on which software or workflow you use.   With the D-Log M you don't lose any highlight or darkness details, so you have many choices in how you want the image to look.  When you use AUTO or the standard colors, the images is baked as it is is and you really can't do much to fix it.

In D-LOG-M all the shadowy areas of your photos would have been visible and you can choose how much detail you want to retain or even enhance.

++With LOG, you could actually capture all the details under the bill of your cap and the same areas under your helmet.

The problem with AUTO exposure when not using D-LOG-M, the Action 4 sees that there is light behind you (the subject) and will assume the scene is already sufficiently lit.
If using the D-Log M, the background lighting would be muted but the data still retained, the shadowy and dark areas captured in detail, then you can restore and control all that on your computer using a LUT or adjusting manually using the various scopes in your editing tool.

kaylee471 Posted at 11-4 12:36
Thanks for replying. But doesn't the sharpness just adds a digital sharpness to the videos? Same as if I add sharpness later with my editing software?

I will think in theory yes, but with the noise reduction it will just blurry the video. So think adding sharpness in camera will prevent that.
From my own tests it looks like +1 sharpness will work great in low light with -1 on noise reduction. But try for yourself to see what you like.

Hi, kaylee471. Thank you for reaching out. All the files on the Google Drive are photos only. Our relevant team would like to request original videos for further checking. Please upload the files to Google Drive or DropBox for further investigation. Thank you for your cooperation.

DJI Gamora Posted at 11-10 06:46
Hi, kaylee471. Thank you for reaching out. All the files on the Google Drive are photos only. Our relevant team would like to request original videos for further checking. Please upload the files to Google Drive or DropBox for further investigation. Thank you for your cooperation.

Thank you!

Here's the link. Feel free to request more or the whole footage if you need it.
Cheers!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1If14-M9BZqsMak9ccQNHq8RGCx9nWxdU?usp=sharing

kaylee471 Posted at 11-10 09:31
Thank you!

Here's the link. Feel free to request more or the whole footage if you need it.

Thank you, kaylee471. We'll keep you posted.

I still think that there's some software or hardware issue. Many times my face looks blurry and way to smooth without many details. And I also noticed that the background sometimes seems to be sharper than my face or sharper than other things that I hold in front of the camera. What do you guys think? Is this normal or not?

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we all love to document,   not sure  what you set up or expect from  lights above in a night scene. but again do share each and  every setting . I simply do not use Pro and go on the fly with mine and satasfied.

kaylee471 Posted at 11-30 09:01
I still think that there's some software or hardware issue. Many times my face looks blurry and way to smooth without many details. And I also noticed that the background sometimes seems to be sharper than my face or sharper than other things that I hold in front of the camera. What do you guys think? Is this normal or not?

[view_image]

As it relates to the focusing issue you mentioned:  DJI has made it clear that the sweet spot starts and 40cm or 0.4m.    In your case, you are holding the camera too close to your face.  This is why the Action4 is advertised with the "selfie stick".

As it relates to the LED lighing, I've parked my Ulanzi VL49 for a Smallrig.  It is brighter, shines further and has better battery life.  My only issue with it is that it doesn't have a display to show the exact color temperature that is set.

Hey Kaylee I just wanted to follow up with how everything is going.

I just got the Action 4 and found the same issues as you.
Never had issues with GoPro or my Insta 360 One R.

I just liked what the DJI offered more but not happy with results in the same ways you showed.

djiuser_KIMI5dxeRJSx Posted at 1-18 06:07
Hey Kaylee I just wanted to follow up with how everything is going.

I just got the Action 4 and found the same issues as you.

Hey,
sad to hear that you have similar issues with your Action 4. So far I use the Action 4 a lot for vlogging and I think that the blurry image quality got slightly better. But I'm not happy with the video quality in general cause it does not look sharp as it's supposed to look. When I compare my video footage with 5 year old Youtube Videos filmed with a Gopro, those videos look even sharper than mine. I was thinking a lot to adjust the lens manually or not and now I decided to buy that big tweezer to at least make the videos look more sharp. I would actually switch back to GoPro if they didn't have any overheating issues. My Action 4 has not overheated even once since I started using that camera. My Gopro 10 would have overheated maybe even 100x already.