Best video settings

[dmbrody]

Here is where I’m coming out on best video settings for highest quality. I’m still experimenting, so this may change:

4K Standard (not Cinema)
24 or 30 FPS (I prefer 24)

ISO: 100
WB: set for current conditions
Shutter: 1/50 to 1/100

P-LOG

I’m using the Freewell ND Filters. Not sure about them. I suspect they aren’t truly neutral. Worse yet, I also suspect the have different color tints depending on which ND you use (4,8,16, etc).

HDR is nice, but over saturated especially in greens. Hard to work with (for me) in Davinci Resolve. For now I’m not shooting the HDR. Instead I’m forgoing HDR and just trying to nail the exposure durring capture. That’s also the reason I’m not allowing myself to be a slave to the 180 rule. If I need to go up to 1/100 to get the best exposure, it’s worth it.

Note: It seems to be best to expose a little dark. You can recover a lot of detail in the blacks in resolve.

The lack of a histogram is major problem, but we have to make do.

Why Standard instead of Cinema? So far, the only difference I can detect is resolution. I’m fine with 3840x2160 and it allows 30fps if I need that.

Unfortunately I haven’t found a plog to rec709 Correction LUT, so color correction has to be done manually in Resolve. A rec709 LUT would be a huge time saver. I’ve heard the Anafi’s plog is close to the Phantom 4 D-log, but not from an actual colorist. It might make the most sense to use Natural instead of plog for most people. For now.

I’m curious what others have found for best settings for best video quality.

I’d be especially interested if anyone can reccomend a good log to rec 709 camera/correction LUT for plog.

 

[seefeel]

Thanks for sharing as those are the same settings I am mostly using. HDR to my eye on the Anafi is oversaturated and like you said skews green. I have been doing manual color corrections in FCPX with the P Log footage I have been darkening the shadows and mids and bumping up the highlights then boosting saturation a touch in the master channel. Works to get a good overall color aesthetic. Have not used the D log rec 709 lut yet although I have it. I am however struggling with noise. It appears everywhere even in highlights. Usually I would expose to the right to protect against noise, as it usually is always in shadows, however, I am seeing it everywhere in my Anafi 4k video.

Waiting for the rain to end so I can fly more and continue experimenting. Disappointed to hear about your comments on the Freewell ND filters. I ordered them and they should be here this week.

Definitely need a histogram in the app ASAP.

 

[dmbrody]

Thanks for sharing as those are the same settings I am mostly using. HDR to my eye on the Anafi is oversaturated and like you said skews green. I have been doing manual color corrections in FCPX with the P Log footage I have been darkening the shadows and mids and bumping up the highlights then boosting saturation a touch in the master channel. Works to get a good overall color aesthetic. Have not used the D log rec 709 lut yet although I have it. I am however struggling with noise. It appears everywhere even in highlights. Usually I would expose to the right to protect against noise, as it usually is always in shadows, however, I am seeing it everywhere in my Anafi 4k video.

Waiting for the rain to end so I can fly more and continue experimenting. Disappointed to hear about your comments on the Freewell ND filters. I ordered them and they should be here this week.

Definitely need a histogram in the app ASAP.

Well I’m not 100% sure about color tints in the Frewell ND filters. Maybe they are fine.

I did a ton of tests with these settings today in Iceland. There was a lot of noise everywhere in the darks and the midtones, just as you described. I did not recall seeing this much noise when I was testing in Auto. Makes me wonder if they apply some noise reduction internally when set to auto???

Still, the p-log footage retains a lot of detail in the blacks, so as long as I’m going to have to remove noise anyway, I’ll expose darker to preserve clouds in the sky.

When I get home I’m going to make my own profile for Neat Video to remove the noise, unless someone already has posted a good one. If you use Final cut, there is a Neat Video plug-in for Final Cut (and just about every IDE). It is miraculous. If you don’t have it already, I highly recommend it... although it’s super processor intensive - best to edit down your footage first to save hours of render time. Generally you want remove the noise with Neat before you mess with exposure, color correct or color grade. An external GPU helps speed things up.

My workflow will probably be to first import into Final Cut. (I prefer Final Cuts awesome media manegemnt system over Premiere or Resolve). In final cut, I’ll cull out the crap footage, then run whats left through Neat Video and do any stabilization that’s required. I’ll render that out to ProRes 422 HQ.

Next I’ll bring all the ProRes renders into Resolve to do color correction. You kind of have to convert from log to rec 709 before you color correct. Resolve doesn’t really handle log footage that well (qualifiers struggle, etc). I bet Final Cut color correction would benefit from a conversion to Rec 709 too (but I don’t really know). I know the latest Final Cut has some powerful new color correction tools built in, but I’m accustomed to Resolve, so I’ll stick with that.

Anyway, once I’m done with the color correction (and any grading) in Resolve, I’ll render once again to ProRes 422HQ, and bring all that footage back into FinalCut.

At that point I’ll have noise free, stabilized, and color correct/graded footage back in FinalCut. (I’ll probably take a moment to delete the intermediary renders I generated along the way to free up some drive space. I’ll only keep my nice new stable, clean color corrected renders, plus the original h.264 footage I started with).

Exceptions along the way:
- If I need to, I’ll use the stabilizer in Premiere Pro which is great. The Anafi seems plenty stable so this probably won’t be nessisary.
- I’m not very experienced with editing in the timeline in Resolve, but if its a simple edit with no titles, transitions, or effects, then I won’t bother to round trip back to Final Cut.

 

[Jagerbomb52]

I only use Adobe, anything else just bogs down my computer.
Resovle is the worst on my Windows machine. It just hangs big time. Many of the programs that want to be better then Adobe that has been around for ever are resource hogs in my opinion

 

[ifana]

Well I’m not 100% sure about color tints in the Frewell ND filters. Maybe they are fine.

I did a ton of tests with these settings today in Iceland. There was a lot of noise everywhere in the darks and the midtones, just as you described. I did not recall seeing this much noise when I was testing in Auto. Makes me wonder if they apply some noise reduction internally when set to auto???

Still, the p-log footage retains a lot of detail in the blacks, so as long as I’m going to have to remove noise anyway, I’ll expose darker to preserve clouds in the sky.

When I get home I’m going to make my own profile for Neat Video to remove the noise, unless someone already has posted a good one. If you use Final cut, there is a Neat Video plug-in for Final Cut (and just about every IDE). It is miraculous. If you don’t have it already, I highly recommend it... although it’s super processor intensive - best to edit down your footage first to save hours of render time. Generally you want remove the noise with Neat before you mess with exposure, color correct or color grade. An external GPU helps speed things up.

My workflow will probably be to first import into Final Cut. (I prefer Final Cuts awesome media manegemnt system over Premiere or Resolve). In final cut, I’ll cull out the crap footage, then run whats left through Neat Video and do any stabilization that’s required. I’ll render that out to ProRes 422 HQ.

Next I’ll bring all the ProRes renders into Resolve to do color correction. You kind of have to convert from log to rec 709 before you color correct. Resolve doesn’t really handle log footage that well (qualifiers struggle, etc). I bet Final Cut color correction would benefit from a conversion to Rec 709 too (but I don’t really know). I know the latest Final Cut has some powerful new color correction tools built in, but I’m accustomed to Resolve, so I’ll stick with that.

Anyway, once I’m done with the color correction (and any grading) in Resolve, I’ll render once again to ProRes 422HQ, and bring all that footage back into FinalCut.

At that point I’ll have noise free, stabilized, and color correct/graded footage back in FinalCut. (I’ll probably take a moment to delete the intermediary renders I generated along the way to free up some drive space. I’ll only keep my nice new stable, clean color corrected renders, plus the original h.264 footage I started with).

Exceptions along the way:
- If I need to, I’ll use the stabilizer in Premiere Pro which is great. The Anafi seems plenty stable so this probably won’t be nessisary.
- I’m not very experienced with editing in the timeline in Resolve, but if its a simple edit with no titles, transitions, or effects, then I won’t bother to round trip back to Final Cut.

That is a lot of rendering! Ever tried dynamic linking?

 

[ifana]

I only use Adobe, anything else just bogs down my computer.
Resovle is the worst on my Windows machine. It just hangs big time. Many of the programs that want to be better then Adobe that has been around for ever are resource hogs in my opinion

The free version of resolve is a hog as it doesn't contain the 4k decoder that the pro version does. I tend to convert 4k to an uncompressed video file. The highly compressed h264 codec that comes off the drone is a pig to work with on most PCs

 

[dmbrody]

I only use Adobe, anything else just bogs down my computer.
Resovle is the worst on my Windows machine. It just hangs big time. Many of the programs that want to be better then Adobe that has been around for ever are resource hogs in my opinion

Yeah. When I use Premiere, only on PC. Performance on Mac is rough. On the Mac though, FinalCut rips through h264 and h265 footage very quickly, even at 4K. If your in the field with a MacBook, Premiere isn’t really an option.

As for Resolve, it can’t be beat for color correction. Doesn’t matter what platform you’re on.

 

[dmbrody]

That is a lot of rendering! Ever tried dynamic linking?

Well yes. I have, and for a bigger project I’d definitely round trip that way. Also export the XML into Resolve if there is a timeline. But the truth is that I hardly ever go back into FinalCut. I just use it to import off the SD card, organize the clips (because i like their asset manager), pick one or two clips to send to Resolve, and do the final render out of Resolve. Done.

 

[Jagerbomb52]

The free version of resolve is a hog as it doesn't contain the 4k decoder that the pro version does. I tend to convert 4k to an uncompressed video file. The highly compressed h264 codec that comes off the drone is a pig to work with on most PCs

Ya I find the Anafi 4K really hard to work with. My Autel and Yuneec UAV's produce 4K and I have no problem with them.

 

[seefeel]

Neat Video is outstanding and has saved me a few times on professional projects. However, for hobby 4k video, I do not want to have to use it. I do exactly as you describe with noise reduction then export to pro res to work in FCPX. Premiere is just horrendous with 4k and a super bloated program at that. I left it a year ago to go back to FCPX.

I really don't want a crazy workflow for hobby video. This is where I am pushing the manual settings to see if what is more likely compression artifacts rather than noise can get cleared up.

 

[AnafiPilot]

Fantastic conversation...thanks for posting!

 

[Jagerbomb52]

Have any of you guys tried the Cinepunch LUTMASTER For (Win-OSX)? There are a tone in there but I do find checking them out very time consuming.
I just started using LUTs last year and not sure if I like them, I prefer to adjust mine manually to my liking.

 

[dmbrody]

Have any of you guys tried the Cinepunch LUTMASTER For (Win-OSX)? There are a tone in there but I do find checking them out very time consuming.
I just started using LUTs last year and not sure if I like them, I prefer to adjust mine manually to my liking.

I’m starting to use LUTs more, but basically just camera/correction LUTs to get footage to rec709. There don’t seem to be any P-LOG to rec709 for Anafi yet, so instead I’m using RCM in Resolve, which is probably how I should be doing it anyway.

 

[dmbrody]

Ya I find the Anafi 4K really hard to work with. My Autel and Yuneec UAV's produce 4K and I have no problem with them.

Try converting the Anafi footage to Rec 709 first. It’s really hard to color correct log footage. Everything goes wonky and you don’t get the expected behavior from color adjustments. Color pickers, curves, wheels, all behave oddly. Let me dig up a video on RCM because I mentioned that just a minute ago in this thread.

 

[dmbrody]

Ya I find the Anafi 4K really hard to work with. My Autel and Yuneec UAV's produce 4K and I have no problem with them.

Try converting the Anafi footage to Rec 709 first. It’s really hard to color correct log footage. Everything goes wonky and you don’t get the expected behavior from color adjustments. Color pickers, curves, wheels, all behave oddly. Let me dig up a video on RCM because I mentioned that just a minute ago in this thread.

Edit: here’s a good one.

Edit 2: not sure if that video posted. I’m in a really poor reception area and it’s not showing up. Search YouTube for “Convert log to rec.709 automatically with RCM | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial”

 

[Jagerbomb52]

Very educational but way more then I would ever need. Maybe this winter when the snow is on the ground and it's 40 below I might make time to tinker with it LOL
Maybe by then they will have he Anafi camera profile also

 

[dmbrody]

Very educational but way more then I would ever need. Maybe this winter when the snow is on the ground and it's 40 below I might make time to tinker with it LOL
Maybe by then they will have he Anafi camera profile also

Fair enough. But did you note the part where he talks about the difficulty of working with LOG? It’s not just in Resolve. I believe (not 100% sure) the same applies to lumetri in PP, Final Cut color wheels and curves, and pretty much everything. However you do it, life is going to be a lot easier to convert to rec 709 first. Well, you could not shoot in plog to begin with, but then you’ll lose some detail in the blacks. It depends what your doing.

It’s worth mentioning that if you do have a recent Mac, you could convert to p3 instead, which is a much much wider color gamut than rec 709, but you’ll eventually have to convert to Rec 709 anyway if you plan to post online or share with anyone other than a Mac user or a professional editor.

 

[ifana]

I’m starting to use LUTs more, but basically just camera/correction LUTs to get footage to rec709. There don’t seem to be any P-LOG to rec709 for Anafi yet, so instead I’m using RCM in Resolve, which is probably how I should be doing it anyway.

But what would the input colour space be?

 

[jdxmoore]

But what would the input colour space be?

I'd like to know this also.
I've been going through a few and S-Gammut/S-Log seems okay but I'm a novice at this so just guessing

 

[ifana]

According to the video exif, it should be YUV, but that just turns everything purple