If you own a Mavic 2 Pro, you may know when you shoot in 10-bit video there’s a significant amount of barrel distortion. Luckily, there’s now a solution!
The Mavic 2 Pro’s barrel distortion has been a public issue. DJI tackled the problem and released presets and values to correct the distortion in Premiere Pro, Final Cut, and DaVinci Resolve.
Why does this only happen in the 10-bit mode?
Barrel distortion on the Mavic 2 Pro only happens when you film in 10-bit video. So those that shoot in 8-bit don’t experience the distortion. Why is this? Well, when shooting in 8-bit, the Mavic 2 Pro automatically corrects the barrel distortion natively. It doesn’t correct the distortion in 10-bit.
The solution
DJI has released the official correction in the latest user manual. For DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro X users, they must input the values below manually. Adobe Premiere Pro users can have the correction automatically implemented.
There have been unofficial fixes as well. The video below shows a custom fix for the distortion made by The Film Poets. It seems to work well.
The image quality is affected
Most corrections lower the quality of the image, so that’s to be expected. Still, some loss of sharpness is probably better than having to deal with barrel distorted footage. For the most part, the Mavic 2 Pro’s barrel distortion is modest and the footage overall looks sharp. So the quality loss shouldn’t be substantial.
