is there something wrong with my X5s when shooting RAW?

[smoak5]

So i just got the my I2 all ready for RAW 5.2k. I did a quick flight to test. I used After effects to color grade and i noticed a lot of pixelation/artifacts especially in highlighted areas. Please see the clip below:

At first I thought maybe it was from burned pixels on the sensor, but the ProRes and the h.26x footage do not have this. Should I have my I2 returned? after spending all this money for RAW recording, it is definitely disappointing.

any advice is welcomed.

 

[videosophy]

Not sure if I understand what you mean but I see some vibrations in the footage if thats what you meant. Otherwise you seem to have pulled down the highlights quite a lot.

 

[smoak5]

You have to watch the YouTube video in 1440p. Not as obvious as in the actual files and not YouTube compression. But you can still see the little burnt pixels in the clouds near the top of the frame in the center.

I reinstalled the firmware to the drone and subsequent footage sometimes shows the burnt pixels and some times it doesn't. Strange.

 

[Ole Martin Wold]

I recon it´s just that you have pulled to hard in the highlights and/or dehaze/clarity. Even rawfiles will break up at some point.

I´d be interested in seeing one of the rawDNG files. Could you by any chance share one of those files?

 

[smoak5]

Unfortunately I wish that were the case. Those pixel artifacts are seen clearly in the non graded footage. I just pulled the highlights to accentuate it so it could be seen on YouTube with their compression algorithm. I spoke with dji support they have not heard of this. I reinstalled firmware and that helped a little but the pixels are there. When they don't show up, the image looks so much better. When they do show up, there is a lot more noise. It almost seems like when on some cameras when the sensor gets overwhelmed that that you get all this noise.

I would like to post the files, but they are huge! Any ideas on how I can post them?

 

[Ole Martin Wold]

That's strange...

Dropbox is probably the easiest way to share a file. They are about 40mb or so? Put it there and create a link to it.

 

[Andy Gibb]

Might be a hardware problem, with the camera picking up random interference from somewhere

 

[smoak5]

That's strange...

Dropbox is probably the easiest way to share a file. They are about 40mb or so? Put it there and create a link to it.

No. The files are like 1GB per 3 seconds of footage!

 

[Ole Martin Wold]

That's strange...

Dropbox is probably the easiest way to share a file. They are about 40mb or so? Put it there and create a link to it.

No. The files are like 1GB per 3 seconds of footage!

So it's not a cinemaDNG sequence then.

 

[smoak5]

Yes it is a cinema dng sequence. For raw the data rates are over 4gbps!

 

[Barry Goyette]

how bout just save a single frame, or upload one of the DNGs' from the image sequence. I'm with Martin on this. It looks like you are simply overexposed in those highlights, which would "clip" and leave a jagged edge. Pulling highlights "down" when you are clipped only make the issue worse. You haven't said what gamma you shot this with, but if it's LOG or Cine, the correct approach to exposure would be to protect those highlights by underexposing slightly, producing an overall "dark" image and then pull your mid-tones "up" in post, not down.

 

[smoak5]

That's a great idea! Stupid me. I'll just upload a single frame of the dng sequence and you can open it up with adobe camera raw to see what I'm talking about. It is pretty obvious. I will do it when I get back from work. Thanks guys.
Everything was shot in cinemaDNG so it is raw. Not log. No color option for raw footage.

 

[Barry Goyette]

As I'm still waiting for my **** SSD, I haven't had the pleasure, but shooting in raw, the same rules apply. Very important to "not clip highlights", especially if you plan to have a "darkened" sky look. "Regular" gammas build a knee into the curve that lets the highlights roll off in a pleasing way, hiding most clipping. But Raw encoding exposes the limits of the sensor in many ways...and if Go4 is showing the "raw" data versus applying a gamma during shooting, the first most common mistake someone would make would be to overexpose, as a correctly exposed Raw, with no gamma applied should look very dark.(I really doubt DJI is showing unadulterated raw through the app, it's probably some sort of log they are applying, but regardless protecting the highlights is just as important in raw as in any other mode). Lets see your DNG and hopefully that will shed some light on this.

 

[smoak5]

Sorry I misunderstood the previous comment--No the go4 app is not showing the raw image as the image transmission. It looks like the usual image from when you record on the micro sd card so whatever color profile you use and whatever codec is used.

In regards to clipping, the artifacts appear everywhere, not just the highlighted areas. Even in shadows and mid tones. Something is not right with the sensor in raw. Everything is fine with prores but the higher bit rates of raw is messing things up!

 

[Ole Martin Wold]

Very very strange... Going to be interesting to see one of the files for sure.

 

[smoak5]

here is the file from yesterday. as you can see in the clouds, it is speckled with black dots.

Dropbox - Public

so i took my drone out today. iso 100,1/50,f7.1,AWB and the images are flawless. no noise. looks beautiful when graded with davinci. i did nothing different than yesterday. this is so frustrating. ill post a link to that footage as soon as it is up in youtube.

 

[smoak5]

here is the link to the footage that came out great today. strange...i wish i had more faith that the results would be consistent....

 

[Ole Martin Wold]

Oh yeah now I see what you mean.

That´s pretty bad. It reminds me of a issue I originally had with the phantom 3 pro back in the day, where the sensor hotspots were very prominent. I then learned that the P3p did not remove these hotspots in-camera (like most other cameras out there do) and that I had to process the raw files through the DJI DNG cleaner app. It´s worth noting that I never saw these spots in video (h264) or JPEG still shots. Only in the DNG files.
But I have never seen this since ( in the Inspire 1) I have not yet received my SSD so I can´t compare to my bird´s cinema DNG files, however I have not seen any hotspots yet in the DNG still shots I have taken.

Pretty much ALL cameras have hotspots like these, even brand new, but the cameras these days do such a great job removing them before writing to the memory card that no one notices.
I have no idea how to proceed with this, except talking to the shop where you got your bird from.

 

[smoak5]

so it turns out that even the footage shot on the microSD has those same hotspots! when i look at the h.264 shots that recorded as the same time as the raw DNG shots, those hot spots are evident too! so it must be the sensor. I am going to talk to DJI again

 

[Barry Goyette]

Those aren't classic "hot" pixels --bad photo sites on the sensor--- as they are in different places on the two dng you uploaded. I wish I could tell you what they are, but it seems obvious you have a defective camera, or there is something going very wrong in the raw encoding. Those are in no way normal. Are you seeing similar spots on still images taken from the camera, this might tell us if it's related to the video encoding. If it's the sensor, it show up on the stills as well.