if you own a mavic 3 DJI recently updated the firmware to include something called night
mode Let's go test it
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if you don't know me my name is Jake and I test and review lots of drones cameras lenses
and other filmmaking equipment usually in Alaska and I give you tips and tutorials on
how to use them if that's something that interests you consider subscribing [Applause] night
mode has been out of here where you if you tap on the video you can go to night mode
here and then it adds some new options for your different ISO settings you can now can
go all the way from 800 to 12 800 ISO but the cool thing is also in d-log here which
you can see in shooting d-log or hlg either one I usually shoot in d-log you now have
800 and 1600 as an option 1600 didn't used to be there so that's very very nice I went
out and filmed all those about two hours after Sunset so it was completely dark there was
no other light now being in a city definitely helps because you have lots of ambient light
but it also gives you lots of detail to look at and see what sort of noise reduction effects
are in place when DJI is applying noise reduction built into the Drone which is what they're
doing but let's look at the footage and then we'll dive into a little bit more because
I also did some d-log and hlg tests as well to see what you can do with that footage now
that they added 16 500 ISO to d-log and hlg which is absolutely awesome but I was really
curious to see what the 6400 and the 12 800 ISO in night mode would do so let's take a
look okay so this is ISO 3200
oh wow that is clean holy crap that's really clean this is ISO 6400 let's see 3200 6400
so you can definitely see there's more noise and more noise reduction kicking in the details
in the buildings just got a tiny bit softer but it's still really good uh actually very
good and this I also 12 800 which honestly like
there's a slight difference between 6400 and 12 800 as far as the loss of detail due to
noise reduction and I mean you can see lots of noise up in the sky and stuff um but it's
still very good like it didn't turn the image completely to Mush which is what I was wondering
so this is ISO 3200 because that felt about right for the exposure and I mean you can
see this person running down here this is all in 4k it's really good detail the sky
looks good I mean there's noise but it looks pretty clean it doesn't look super noisy which
is just impressive as heck man that's that is super impressive that is really good there's
a couple more shots here where we have ISO 6400 this is 12 800 and like uh I mean this
like there's noise up here by the building up top here but that is just the fact that
the light is blowing it's actually over Overexposed if you look here I mean the detail is still
very good okay so then the next thing I really wanted to check was d-log and hlg hlg is an
interesting one to shoot with at night because of the way it exposes it's it's much brighter
so when you bring it in you get um more information to work with it's it's more of a wide dynamic
range or high dynamic range codec or color profile but uh d-log being that they added
1600 ISO 1600 to d-log and to hlg I really wanted to see what that was like because I
use d-log a lot in all of my professional jobs I'm handing footage off to colorists
who then go through and color it and in the past anytime anybody wanted night shots basically
I had to shoot in normal profile and 1600 ISO and they had to do their best that they
could cleaning up the noise with neat video which I'll show you some examples here in
a minute but also being able to try and fit the normal color profile with the other log
footage that they were using and it was still very noisy and it wasn't great quality this
is a massive improvement over that already I can tell you right now it's a huge Improvement
but having d-log with ISO 1600 I'm very curious to see what it's capable of and what the noise
looks like and then we'll dive into using neat video to maybe add some noise reduction
and get rid of that this is d-log so you can tell right now like it it's very noisy but
again where it is of 1600 on a four thirds inch sensor but still there's lots of detail
there there's a fair amount of dynamic range that's not bad so there's two ways we can
deal with the noise you go d-log here if you add a Lut which is this is the DJI Lut that
you can download the d-log to 709 it gets rid of a lot of the noise right away because
it's it's bringing all the Shadows way down and the noise lives in the shadows so it's
crushing the Shadows which means the noise looks like it disappears it doesn't really
but it definitely makes it a lot cleaner I mean like that's usable right there that's
already just really really usable but say uh I mean it's it's a little soft the details
the details are a little soft uh but it's not bad I mean down here you can see the tracks
it's it's pretty good I I'm pretty impressed with how well this is doing this is hlg this
is 800.
here this is I think this is also 800 if I remember right definitely noise but all that
can be cleaned up really easily with something like neat video here in the sky we can get
rid of all of that I'm not going to show you what neat video does or how to how to use
it or anything like that but it's a great program it's it's a it's a resource hog like
it will bog down your computer like nobody's business like so here is d-log uh and then
what I'm going to do is apply the Lut
and you could do this either way so you can see there's still noise in the sky it's pretty
fine and a lot of it's dealt with just because the Shadows have been brought down so much
but then if we skip to where we added in noise reduction
right here it's a lot cleaner in the sky now I'm not going to play this because it'll drop
frames like crazy because of the way neat video works this is a really big update to
the mavic 3.
it really is impressive what they've brought into this drone for low light performance
at these crazy high isos now I know they're adding a lot of noise reduction but the noise
reduction is doing an excellent job in preserving detail but also dealing with the noise I mean
this is on the level where it's kind of rivaling and getting into the Inspire 2 image quality
territory with the X7 camera which is a super 35 sensor it's larger than this and it's better
quality Optics because it's better lenses but that's really impressive coming out of
this drone so if you're gonna go out and fly at night like this now is a useful tool at
night well after Sunset before I would not have gone out much more than 20 to 30 minutes
after Sunset and to be able to capture anything usable here in the U.S If You're Gonna Fly
at night and I think most countries you need to have a strobe that's physical from three
nautical miles so this is the Loom cube strobe it's really easy I just have it set so that
it velcros to the top of the Drone and then I can fly legally at night now my biggest
question is can this record the Aurora at night in Alaska
until then you're going to want to watch this video here which teaches you some good drone
moves that will really help set your footage apart as always if you have questions ask
me in the comments below or join my live stream which happens Wednesday nights at 4 pm Alaska
time or 8 PM Eastern until I make that next video I'll see you again soon cheers