DJI Mavic 2 Pro - Best Settings & Review

So this is the Mavic 2 Pro which I've been using for a couple of months now and what I want to do in this video is to see how this compares to the previous Mavic Pro which was the first drone that I had and also the Mavic Air and also in the second part of the video I'm going to look at some of the best settings that you can use to get the most out of this camera. Now I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail and look at all the specs and all the different possibilities and all the different features of this drone. There are so many videos already like that on YouTube but what I do want to do is look at how useful this drone is for my particular uses. Now I'm a landscape photographer and I travel a lot and my trips revolve around taking photographs of still images so the drone for me has to be able to fit easily alongside my regular photography kit and my tripod and stuff like that so I need it to be really portable and what I tend to use this for is to get b-roll for YouTube videos and things like that but more and more I'm finding I'm using drones to give me a different perspective and to give me a different angle and for still photography from the air. So what I'm particularly interested in in this drone is how much of an improvement it is over the first Mavic. Now the Mavic Pro, the first one, was the first drone that I ever owned and I was really impressed with it. It was a fantastic portable drone and I took it with me pretty much everywhere on every trip that I ever made. It went with me to Iceland, it went with me to Norway, to the Dolomites, to Tuscany and it never once let me down. I found it to be a really stable, reliable drone. It was really capable in the high winds in the Icelandic highlands, I flew it in the freezing cold in northern Norway in winter and even in some light rain in Tuscany. The software was really reliable and I never had any problems with connections and generally speaking the image quality was really great with some caveats. There were some problems with the image quality of the first Mavic drone mostly due to the small sensor size and the low bit rate which is the speed the data is processed from the sensor and then transferred. Now you can see in this example here in the Black Sand Desert in the Icelandic highlands there's a lot of noise which is kind of like moiré which I found I got particularly a lot when I was panning with the gimbal when I had the gimbal pointing straight down and then moved it up. It also didn't deal particularly well with noise and it wasn't very capable in low light which again you can see here shooting the low light of dusk the image was just so noisy that wasn't really anything that I could do with it. What I found with the Mavic is that it had quite a lot of inbuilt noise reduction which made the image quite soft. There's always this kind of push-pull relationship between too much noise and too much noise reduction and over sharpening which I found quite difficult to get good shots from in low light. So earlier this year I switched to the Mavic Air which is actually quite an impressive drone for its small size. It still has the same small sensor as the original Mavic but the increased bit rate did give slight improvements to the image quality. Now it wasn't great but it was a little bit more usable in low light however the problem that I had with the Mavic Air was that instead of the OcuSync radio connection of the original Mavic Pro they switched to a Wi-Fi connection which I found a lot less reliable. With the Mavic Pro I'd never had any connection problems but in the short time that I had it I would get dropouts in connection, connection would fall down, the drone would return home or stop filming or I'd lose control with it even when it was not particularly far away at less than 200 meters. So I wasn't 100% satisfied and I never really had the confidence in it that I did in the first Mavic. So when the Mavic 2 was announced a couple months ago I was immediately interested particularly in the larger sensor which I think interested a lot of people because I really hoped it was going to give me that much improved image quality particularly in low light and particularly in the shadows. I was also much happier to be returning to the OcuSync connection in fact the Mavic 2 has got OcuSync 2 which is an even stronger connection than the original. Now before we dig in I'd just like to say thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video again. I've been using their web templates for my own website for a couple of years now and they're really fantastic so please visit the link www.squarespace.com So let's start by having a look at the physical differences in the drone itself. It is a little bit bigger it's a little bit longer and it's a little bit deeper about the same width but really there's not any significant difference you can still carry it just as easily as you could before for me it fits in the exact same place as in my bag as the previous drone did. What it is though is quite a bit heavier it's a little bit less than 200 grams heavier and just to give you an idea of what that is 280 grams is about the weight of my iPhone plus. Now most of that weight is from the much larger batteries which is kind of worth it because it does give the drone a significantly longer flight time to its predecessor. Now the drone does feel a lot more finished and polished than the previous iteration if that makes any sense. Now the first drone was great the first Mavic was great but you did get the impression it was perhaps a little bit rushed to market. I think DJI wanted to announce and launch it in time to compete with the GoPro Carmen and I think that was particularly noticeable around the gimbal housing which while I never had any problems with it it did look like it was held together with paper clips and elastic bands it looked a little bit frail and didn't give you a whole lot of confidence. The gimbal housing on this is completely different it's really solid beautifully designed it really is a lot more solid looking and gives the impression that DJI spent a fair bit more time designing it and making it look pretty solid. And the same improved design is also extended to the gimbal clamp which is now one piece rather than the two kind of fiddly pieces of the original drone and the whole thing basically feels a lot more aerodynamic the corners are rounded it's a lot smoother and it just feels like a more polished and refined piece of equipment. The same thing can be said about the controller it's had a few small subtle improvements it's got the same removable nozzles as Mavic Air which on the one hand are great because they do make it easy and flatter to pack but on the other hand they are very easy to drop and lose they're quite fiddly to take out and put on particularly if you're flying in a cold place and you're wearing gloves. There are a few other small touches that do improve the feeling and the usage of it for example DJI have cut a nice circle out of the arm that holds the phone which means you can access the home button on your phone while the phone is connected to the controller. Also there's now a controller on the side which gives you access to the different flight modes tripod normal and speed now it's a really nice touch because before the tripod mode was buried in the intelligent flight modes and you had to go into the menus to get it just to be able to flick it a tripod mode on the side of control it really makes sense it's a mode that I used to use a lot and I really do appreciate having it much more easier to access. It is turned off by default so you have to go into the menus to change the settings it's in the main controller settings and from there you just enable multiple flight modes but once you've turned it on it's on for good and it's something that I find really useful. Now DJI have significantly improved the features on these new Mavic 2 drones for example they now have obstacle avoidance sensors pretty much all the way around on the top on the bottom obviously on the front on the side but only when you're using one of the one of the active tracking modes but most importantly for me they have obstacle avoidance sensors facing to the rear now I tend to fly the drone backwards a lot I really do like those kind of flying backwards revealing shots so it's something that's really important to me because even when the drone isn't that far away it only needs to be 50 or 100 meters away it's very easy to lose depth perception and see how far away the thing behind you actually is and on the very first flight that I made with the drone these sensors pretty much stopped me from crashing because I was flying backwards across the lake the drone was about 500 meters away and the sensor stopped the drone before I flew backwards into these trees now the drone is very responsive and very very stable to fly I had it in the mountains for a couple of weeks in the Dolomites and we would hike up to about 2500 meters and fly it up there amongst the peaks and occasionally it was very windy and yet the drone handled the wind very well it didn't have any problems at all when I saw the footage later on it was rock solid and while we never went out of line of sight when you're up in the mountains you can get the drone quite a long way away and still have good line of sight without any danger and the connection was rock solid no frame drop outs whatsoever which is absolutely astonishing to me because the drone is transmitting full hd 1080 video back to the phone not a single frame drop out which is really very impressive now the camera now has adjustable aperture I don't know if this is Hasselblad's influence in the camera production but it's a really welcome feature because before on the previous drone the only exposure controls that we had were shutter speed and ISO now with the introduction of aperture control we can just close down the aperture and reduce the amount of light going on to the sensor while keeping the same shutter speed now it doesn't completely negate the need for nd filters because if you're flying in bright light the shutter speed is still going to be really fast even with a smaller aperture so you'll still need nd filters for that but once you get into the margins of the light into the ends of the day or the beginning of the day around sunrise you do find that by getting the aperture a bit smaller you can get a nice lower shutter speed without using an nd filter now one final feature that really interests me on launch is the hyperlapse now I do tend to shoot quite a lot of time lapses when I'm out it's something that I really enjoy doing so the possibility of being able to do a hyperlapse which is basically like a time lapse on a huge rail in the sky was something that really intrigued me now I haven't had a lot of chance to play around with it yet when I was in the dolomites we had almost no clouds whatsoever and shooting a type of hyperlapse without clouds it doesn't really work because you need some movement in the frame to make it more dramatic and pretty much since I've been home in Portugal we've had consistently bad weather but it is something that I'm really interested to try out when I'm in the dolomites I'll be there in January up in the peaks it's something which I think has a huge amount of potential and I'm really excited to try to play around with it more now from what I have done so far there are four different features they're all really useful and they're all very easy to use particularly the waypoint feature it really does give some incredible opportunities for getting really dramatic footage now the processor will do all of the thinking and all the heavy lifting for you tell it how long you want the scene to be and it will decide how many images that you're going to need and it will compress all of those separate images into a short film which is viewable on your phone but the thing to remember is that on your card you're only going to be getting full hd 1080 that video so it's much better to save each of the individual files as a raw file which will give you a lot more latitude to process them in something like lightroom and then turn them to film in your editing software like premiere pro or final cut pro or whatever it is that you use it also gives you the possibility to zoom in to crop into the footage because the images that you're going to be shooting are 20 megapixels which is a much bigger resolution than 4k so you have the capacity to zoom in in the hyperlapse without losing native 4k resolution now all those features are great but why I really bought this drone was because I wanted to see an improvement in the image quality and the image quality on the Mavic 2 Pro is considerably better than the original Mavic and the Mavic Air the one inch sensor gives you much better noise performance and much better low light performance and that nasty moiré kind of effect is completely gone now so just already that's a huge improvement and something that I'm really pleased with the still images are very very good now the camera is a 20 megapixel camera and just to give you some idea of how good the images are this is a panorama that I shot with the Mavic 2 Pro and this is a panorama that I shot pretty much at the same time from a very similar place with my Fuji X-T2 and when we compare them and look at them side by side there really isn't that much difference when you zoom in really close you can see that obviously the X-T2 has a better image quality but overall this is really very good and I would have no problems at all printing images from the Mavic 2 Pro now to get the absolute best out of the sensor these are the settings that I recommend so let's start by looking at the video size settings now the sensor on the Mavic 2 is 20 megapixels which is much more resolution than you need for native 4k so you have a choice here of 4k full field of view and 4k h-key now the difference is that the full frame of view actually samples the whole of the sensor and then down samples the image to give you 4k footage whereas the 4k h-key basically samples one-to-one so it crops the 4k resolution out of the center of the sensor which effectively gives you a digital zoom with no loss of resolution now it's not the same as optical zoom because you don't get any lens compression but it does give you basically a choice between two different focal lengths now I've not been able to see any difference in quality between the full field of view and the 4k hq so really you should use whichever one best suits you in terms of which is the best focal length what you're shooting now the sensor does give you barrel distortion some curving on the horizontal and vertical lines things like the horizon which is particularly noticeable closer to the edge of the frame and it's particularly more noticeable when you're shooting at a wide angle like the full field of view now there is no in-camera fix for this is nothing that you can do in the mavic to get rid of it but matt over the film poets channel has got a fantastic correction which you can download for free i'll put a link in the description below and i really recommend that you visit his channel his analysis of mavic 2 footage and basically all drone footage is absolutely spot on and probably the best on youtube now when it comes to video codec the mavic 2 gives you a choice of h.264 and h.265 and you should definitely go with h.265 because h.265 has 10-bit color whereas h.264 has only 8-bit color and the difference is 10-bit color gives you a four times wider color gamut than 8-bit and why that's important is you'll notice it in the tonal graduation of your images the changes of one color to another particularly in places like highlights so you get a much smoother graduation between bright highlights and color graduations and things like that and h.265 is also much more efficient to transfer and gives you an overall better image quality color you should go with d-log m now log is basically like raw for video so the footage that you get will look really flat straight out of the camera but there's a lot more image data being recorded which means you've got a lot more latitude when it comes to editing now if you're shooting d-log but you don't actually like seeing the flat and contrasting image on the preview on your phone you can just press this button and it will give you a preview with lots of contrast and color put back in but everything that's recorded will be in d-log so the image that goes onto your phone as well as the footage that goes onto the card will be in the flat d-log it's only the preview on your phone that's got that contrast applied to it so now let's look at the style settings now if you're shooting in 10-bit h.265 and d-log m you're going to have quite a wide latitude when it comes to color correction and things like that in editing and you should make sure that these settings maintain that latitude what i found is the best is to have the sharpening set at plus one because like on the previous mavic if you had the sharpening set at zero it introduces a little bit of in-camera noise reduction which is going to soften the image a little bit now it's not as bad as the old mavic it's much better than that but it's better to not have that noise reduction and if you need any apply it yourself in post so sharpening plus one and then i found that for contrast and saturation just keeping them at zero gives you the most neutral color and the least amount of noise and the most latitude for color correction now when it comes to exposure settings you should always shoot in manual never in auto because if you're shooting in auto exposure when you've got the drone up and it's moving around if it's pointing in a slightly brighter scene like it's brighter over here or slightly darker over here as the drone moves around it's going to change the exposure to try to compensate for that so your footage is going to have kind of varying exposure and you always want to keep the exposure set so you get the drone up you take a reading of the exposure you decide shutter speed aperture with the ISO as low as possible the same applies to white balance never have auto white balance which is going to give you color shifts in your footage so again always manually set the white balance for still images you should always be shooting a raw to get the most out of that 20 megapixel sensor it really is quite good and shooting raw will get you a lot more data and give you a lot more latitude for processing your images in light room if there's a particularly wide dynamic range in the scene the auto exposure bracketing function works really well taking multiple images which you can then blend together automatically in light room to capture that entire dynamic range in a dng file now the final settings that you should change are the adjustments to the gimbal settings to give you much smoother more cinematic shots now by default when you lift or lower the gimbal it's a little bit fast and a little bit jerky which gives you kind of a little bit sudden movements when you're moving the gimbal up and down so you should go into the gimbal control settings make that a little bit smoother now i've found that gimbal pitch speed of somewhere around 10 works really well and the gimbal smoothness of somewhere around 20 will really slow it down make it a lot smoother and make it much easier to get those really nice smooth shots when you're moving the drone up and down so the mavic 2 pro is a big step up over the original mavic pro and the mavic air in terms of video quality in terms of still image quality and in terms of features the image quality is superb and it's really great to have the ability to get high quality air footage in such a small portable and easy to carry around drone now is it as good as a phantom 4 pro i don't know i don't have a phantom 4 pro from what i'm reading on the internet the image quality isn't quite as good but that's not really the point the two drones are different and have a different market and a different use the mavic 2 pro is a small consumer drone that's designed to be portable and it should be judged as such and within that context and within that context it's absolutely superb i can carry it alongside my full photography kit alongside a couple of camera bodies lenses and a tripod without really any significant difference now that's not something that i can do with a drone body the size of the phantom it just doesn't have that same usability as the mavic 2 pro so any difference in image quality any sort of slight reduction and they are really very similar is easily compensated by how portable this drone really is so that's everything i hope it's been useful and i hope it's been interesting if you've got any comments or any questions just drop them in the box below and i will make sure i get back to you and once again i'd like to say thank you squarespace for sponsoring these videos that i'm doing this autumn now i've been using squarespace for my own website for a couple of years now and my website is the foundation of my photography business so it's really important to me that it represents my work in the best way possible and i've been seriously impressed by how great squarespace websites are the templates are beautifully designed there's a huge amount of choice and beyond that there's a massive amount of flexibility that allows you to pretty much refine the web pages exactly how you like them with very little effort and no coding at all if you do come across something that you're not sure about how to do i found that they've got customer service it's absolutely fantastic even made and sent me a short video that explained how to get a particular thing done that i wasn't able to do so i'm happy to be able to recommend them and i'm also happy to be able to offer a 10 discount off your first purchase there you can just start your free trial by going to squarespace.com slash andy munford and if you do decide to use them for your website you just enter the code andy munford to get your discount okay so i think that's everything thanks for watching and thank you for supporting the channel good luck with all your photography and all your videography this month and as ever take care and see you next time