DJI Mavic Pro - DON'T Get This Setting WRONG! | Soft Footage Fix

The best settings for the DJI Mavic Pro to avoid soft, mushy footage and keep the image sharp.

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In this video I talk about the soft, smeary, footage that can show up you DJI Mavic Pro footage with certain settings. These shots were done with D-CineLike color profile +1, -1, 0. Firmware v01.03.0600

The conclusion is that the Mavic applies a very poor in-camera noise reduction to the shadows at sharpness settings below +1. I suggest leaving sharpness settings at +1 for all golden hour shooting. If shooting at noon with lots of trees, sharpening at 0 may be preferable because there will be very little shadows in the image, and this will avoid an over-sharpened look.

For an affordable denoiser for FCPX check out ProDenoise
For Premiere check out Magic Bullet Denoiser.

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[brewsnoop]

Love the low-key vibe in your tutorial video. Very informative, thank you.

[SharkRockBass]

Just bought a rarely used (basically brand new) Mavic Pro in late 2024 because I was a fan of the first Mavic series platform and figured it would be a good collectors item as well. However first coming across the footage I realized instantly that the softness in the video was not right and despite the drone being old, the quality somehow must be better. Going on the forums didn't help, but after running into this video a couple of weeks later it solved all my issues. Despite being late to the game, thank you for helping tackle down an issue that took days of experimenting to fix; as an intermediate photographer I am still dumbfounded to this day how I overlooked such a simple sharpness setting.

[calebjacobson]

Thank you!!! I thought I was going insane. I was about to return my Mavic because I thought there was something wrong with the camera. All of the tutorials I have seen for "best settings" have had the sharpness at -2 to -3. I would have never thought my splotchy haze was due to that setting. I live in Washington state, so I was getting a lot of haze with random trees. Thanks, again!

[shadsluiter]

Thank you. I quit using the Mavic Pro I and returned to the Phantom 4 because nearly every evening and low light footage looked fuzzy. The camera also tended to lose focus for a fraction of a second in difficult lighting situations which was just enough to ruin the entire pass. My Phantom is big, heavy, noisy, has less range and worse video feed during flight. However, it always gives reliable, sharp video. I've been waiting for Mavic 2.0 whose main feature is "improved video quality camera"

[WHENIWAKE_JULIANFORTE]

Thanks for this! Does the problem apply to the Mavic Pro2 as well?

I bought your Skygrade LUTs btw - they look awesome!!

[shawnd]

I have been trying to tell people this till I'm blue in the face. Mad how 0 or less sharpening became "the best setting"Finally this idea is getting traction 👌

[KeithDaviesMusic]

Hey guys.. I'm really struggling with my Mavic Pro. I can't get any decent video footage from it at all. The focusing is terrible. I've followed your advice and even purchased your Mavic Correction LUT and I still have image issues. The other day I flew over some water, I tilted the gimbal up to create a reveal shot and I was truly gutted when I got home to see that almost every tree in the shot looked like a sea of cotton wool. All the definition of the trees was gone all except the odd two or three which stood out like a sore thumb because they were obviously different from all the other background foliage. The soft focus issue you speak about totally ruined my whole capture. The water and all it's ripples were in perfect focus but both sides which included sets of trees were horribly unfocused and almost fuzzy where they had no definition what so ever. I'm getting disheartened with my drone because I see tons of awesome footage from other people on YouTube and I can't get even half as good end results as yourself even after following yours and others settings/advice. I've tried resetting the IMU and since I've done that I've not had a chance to fly my drone. I'm hoping to go out with my drone this weekend. If that doesn't work I don't know what I'm going to do?

[drewmorg.]

I took have found +1 Sharpening hands down the best!!! SOOOO CRISPY NOW! GREAT VIDEO BROTHER!

[Waipali]

I just wanted to thank this team for your finding. I swear every single person in YouTube making videos about Mavic Pro settings, mentions this issue and how they use the +1 sharpness setting. Yet, most of them fail to credit you for that. It kind of annoys me, but hey, thank you! we know it was you (or so I think)

[thefilmpoets]

I suggest these settings :
+1 sharpening (to disable in-camera NR), especially during golden hour,
followed by noise reduction in post to address any over sharpened look. If you're shooting at noon with the sun overhead, 0 sharpening may be preferable because most of the image will bright enough to avoid the in-camera NR that takes place in the shadows.

[jjsereday]

Thank you for spending the time to figure this out. This has been a huge issue since day one and really frustrating. I even personally spoke with Michael Perry from DJI and he assured me that it should be as good as the phantom 4 sensor was. Still had issues. Glad to see such a difference on your shots

[MarcoCantieni]

You really saved my day. I was already suspecting, that shooting with sharpening -1 might be the cause for this effect in so many of my films. Thanks for illustrating it quite well.

[thefilmpoets]

Update. As of July 29/2017 firmware this is still an issue.

[David_Hammond]

dude i absolutely love you for this, been dealing with blurry footage for SOO long now. Hopefully this helps!

[joetreleven]

Awesome! Thanks for the answer to my long standing problem! I'm not going to listen to all the other bloggers on the Mavic settings - everyone else says to -3 everything! What do you do with contrast and saturation? Thanks again - definitely subscribing!

[AndyMumford]

Brilliant! This has been bugging me for so long. Sharp in places but shadow areas looking like mush. Thanks load. Subscribed.

[ResellJunkie]

I never comment on videos, but I LOVE you. Had my drone for a couple months now and its been driving me crazy, thank you so much for this!

Good day !, how did u resolve the flickering problem of the mavic, i dont have Nd filters and want to know if by having NDs will resolve this, do you use any?, Or is the Neat video plugin resolve this flickering issue . Really thanks for making this video, i hope you make more fantastics tutorials like this !

[mikevisuals]

Hey! Amazing video, I was just wondering do you follow the same steps when using the Phantom 4 pro?

[schatzor]

Great video! Do you have some tips to get it done on photos in Lightroom?