ok so this might be a me problem but bear with me. updated my air 3 to whatever the latest firmware is, 01.00.0500 i think, and now when i bring the d-log m footage into resolve i'm getting these really strange banding artifacts in the sky on smooth gradients. like subtle but definitely there and definitely not there before the update.

im using the DJI provided lut to convert out of d-log m and then doing my grade on top. nothing changed in my resolve setup, same lut, same workflow. the banding is worse when i push exposure in post which i know isnt ideal but i was doing the same thing before with no issues.

could the firmware have changed something about how it encodes the log footage? feels weird that firmware would affect that but i genuinely cant think of what else changed. or is this a resolve thing somehow. ive been going back and forth on it for two days and im starting to doubt everything about my setup lol

pretty sure the encoding didnt change but i'd check what bitrate mode your camera profile is set to after the update ? sometimes firmware resets certain settings back to default and if it dropped you from high quality to normal that would explain banding especially in skies. happened to me with a phantom 5 update years ago, wasted a whole afternoon before i figured it out.

also worth checking if youre on 10bit or if somehow it got switched. resolve handles 8bit d-log m pretty badly when you start pushing it.

resolve has been doing weird things with certain h.265 streams lately too, might not even be the drone. i had banding show up on air 3 footage that looked fine in the DJI fly app preview but was messed up in resolve, turned out to be a decode setting. try throwing the clip into davinci with the color science set to DaVinci YRGB instead of whatever it defaulted to and see if that changes anything. its a long shot but worth 2 minutes.