Mavic Pro Focus

Every time I fly the Mavic with auto camera settings the pictures come back out of focus the latest support was:

I believe the focus issue you’re describing can be easily fixed. I would recommend checking out this guide to making successful maps, and referring to the “Motion Blur” and “Unfocused Cameras” sections. The best way to prevent blurry photos is to set a slower shutter speed or slowing the drone speed. Please try lowering your shutter speed in the DJI Go app and slowing the speed in the DroneDeploy app before your flight. That should help, but please let me know if the problem continues.
My response
Surely you mean a faster shutter speed? I haven’t got blurry pictures they are out of focus. I flew the same mission today with Pix4D and it managed to set the camera exposure and focus. Isn’t the purpose of DD to do the same and make capturing the correct pictures for upload easy.

Am I the only person with focus problems?

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Hi James,

A few of our users have run into this issue. Apologies. Here’s a tweak from one of our users that seemed to work. Please let me know if this helps.

In DroneDeploy, turn off Automatic Camera Settings

Run DJI Go first to set camera settings

Shutter: 200 or higher to reduce motion blur
Style: Standard or Landscape (to preference)
Color: none or True Color (to preference, D-Log or Cini are two flat)
Histogram: ON to help adjust lighting

Fly with DJI Go to DD project height, and point the camera down
– AF: Tap to set Autofocus to a ground point
– MF: Switch to Manual Focus to eliminate refocusing during the flight
– ISO: Set to to achieve good brightness (e.g. histogram centered)
– White Balance: Sunny, Cloudy, or Custom (not AWB)
– Style: Landscape or Standard
– Color: None or True Color

Fly to a safe location.
Switch to the DroneDeploy app and connect
Run the mission

Hi Kara. Today I did my first flight with DD and was kind of dissappointed when I saw that all pictures were out of focus. Tomorrow I’m going to try the work-around one of the users suggested.
My question is: will the pictures be in focus, even if the elevation of the terrain is rather dramatic? I’m trying to create a 3D map of a slope of a hill… I start the mission at the lowest point of the hill and at fixed height AGL to that start point. Say 60 meter or so. But when the Mavic is at the top of the hill, the height AGL will be somewhere around 15-20 m. I hope that those images will be still in focus… Anyone any experience with that?

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I haven’t had experience with your specific situation and unfortunately, there isn’t terrain awareness. I would recommend trying those settings and see how it goes. I always like to do a trial run of a mission, myself.

I have to +1 this one.

We’ve been trying to create some maps with our Mavic Pro the last few days and the overwhelming majority of them has come back blurry and unusable. Some happened to come back great, by mere chance it seems.

The only workaround that seems to reliably help is the trick Kara mentioned. It is very much a hack though.

Is there really no other way? Are all Mavic users experiencing this?

That’s a good question. There is a user, Phil Savory, who has been making incredible maps with his Mavic and always boasting about how easy it is to get these results with DroneDeploy. I haven’t seen him express anything else but satisfaction: https://twitter.com/phil_savory

When it comes down to it, I think figuring out which Manual settings you need for your specific situation (depending on the time of day, weather (sunny/overcast), etc. is going to determine your success no matter what it is you choose to do with these drones (mapping, photography, videography).

Same problem here. Just came back from a 2 day field work trip, all images blurry.

Also, I just tried the “workaround”. It works, but dronedeploy is still unusable in real life with a mavic pro:

  1. the “workaround” takes time to set up, precious battery capacity is lost.

  2. All settings are lost during a battery change during longer missions. Battery losses are duplicated each battery change, rendering dronedeploy useless for bigger areas.

  3. The tiny camera preview image in the app is useless to check if the camera is in focus, so at least give us a way to make it bigger and zoom in for the next update (unless there is a way already and i haven´t found yet)

  4. It has been more than half a year since the mavic is on the market, how are unfocused images (and no raw support) still a thing???

If anyone knows a good android alternative to dronedeploy (or a better “workaround”) which is actually working with a mavic, please tell us (pix4d capture seems to have similar issues).

For those here on this thread, we want to let you guys know that we our starting a slow rollout of a new version that includes a fix for Mavic focus. In our testing it looks to be promising. The version number is v2.56.0. Android is rolling out slowly now as we continue to test. iOS is still under review, but both are coming soon.