Zoom Effect: Postproduction or While Shooting

[Inky22]

Greetings,

I fly a Mavic Mini 2 which has digital zoom capabilities. Sometimes I find it a bit difficult to get a smooth zoom effect while flying, so I'm thinking maybe it's best to leave it until postproduction. If I have it correct, both scenarios are digital, so the quality of the image should not be superior in one over the other. Of course there are probably advantages to each scenario, but in general which would you choose and why?


Thanks,
Ken

[sum_guy]

Real zoom is better than processed zoom. IMHO

Tried it with my own drone and postprocessed isn't as good.

[Cornucopia]

Think in terms of scaling and (over-) sampling. If you had a 1080p image and wanted to do a seamless 2x zoom in, you cannot do it starting from a 1080p image, because the end result of the zoomed section would be crude, with lower effective resolution. What you need to do is start with a 4k image resampled to 1080p, and then a zoom in to a REAL 1080p window inside the 4k image will be seamless.

As you can guess, the factor of the (high quality, seamless) zoom is determined by the oversampling factor. So for a smooth 8x zoom in, you would need to be starting from an 8x oversampled image.

That is why optical zoom is regularly preferred over digital zoom - because the optical zoom, being analog, is THEORETICALLY capable of infinite oversampling. Though in reality it is limited by the constraints of the optics (zoom ratio, light level, artifacts).


Scott