Best possible video quality with P4P?

OOO · Jan 28, 2018

I usually record at 4K/60 FPS and upload at 4K@30 FPS. Sometimes I record and upload at 4K/30 FPS. I maybe wrong but final video quality looks better when I shoot at 4K/30FPS. So my question is which of the following has the best final video quality?

1) Recording and uploading at 4K/60 FPS
2) Recording at 4K/60 FPS, uploading at 4K/30 FPS
3) Recording and uploading at 4K/30 FPS
4) Recording and uploading at 4K/24 FPS

Do you have any other suggestion to get the most out of this camera?

Thanks in advance for your helps and suggestions.

Mix_ · Jan 28, 2018

OOO said:
I usually record at 4K/60 FPS and upload at 4K@30 FPS. Sometimes I record and upload at 4K/30 FPS. I maybe wrong but final video quality looks better when I shoot at 4K/30FPS. So my question is which of the following has the best final video quality?

1) Recording and uploading at 4K/60 FPS
2) Recording at 4K/60 FPS, uploading at 4K/30 FPS
3) Recording and uploading at 4K/30 FPS
4) Recording and uploading at 4K/24 FPS

Do you have any other suggestion to get the most out of this camera?

Thanks in advance for your helps and suggestions.

It depends from various aspects in taking the footage (shutter speed/angle) editing and end destination, artistic ambitions, etc.,, but, if we keep mathematic first, then Nr. 4 in Your list - 4K/24(25) fps.

Because the max. bitrate of the camera is limited, so, a.e., You have 2 times more information in each frame in 4K/30 than in 4K/60 footage.

OOO · Jan 28, 2018

Mix_ said:
It depends from various aspects in taking the footage (shutter speed/angle) editing and end destination, artistic ambitions, etc.,, but, if we keep mathematic first, then Nr. 4 in Your list - 4K/24(25) fps.

Because the max. bitrate of the camera is limited, so, a.e., You have 2 times more information in each frame in 4K/30 than in 4K/60 footage.

Thank you very much!

African wildlife · Jan 28, 2018

007: I'm not technically qualified on this first point, but a lot of research pointed us towards what we use everytime: 4K (3840 x 2160) 24fps.

We often slightly underexpose. We always use a ND/PL 4/8/16 filter to keep the shutter speed at 1/50th, with ISO 100, and an aperture of f5.6 (or as near as possible). Our white balance is on "sunny" - or, occasionally, "cloudy" if cloudy. We double check or triple check that we've hit focus once in the air with the camera pointed at a suitable subject. And fly/film during golden hour, which makes the best of everything.

Finally, don't crash.

OOO · Jan 28, 2018

African wildlife said:
007: I'm not technically qualified on this first point, but a lot of research pointed us towards what we use everytime: 4K (3840 x 2160) 24fps.

We often slightly underexpose. We always use a ND/PL 4/8/16 filter to keep the shutter speed at 1/50th, with ISO 100, and an aperture of f5.6 (or as near as possible). Our white balance is on "sunny" - or, occasionally, "cloudy" if cloudy. We double check or triple check that we've hit focus once in the air with the camera pointed at a suitable subject. And fly/film during golden hour, which makes the best of everything.

Finally, don't crash.

Thanks AW! Very helpful tips as always. I couldn’t agree more regarding with focusing. I don’t even remember how many times I forgot to tap the screen. One more thing I always do is to format the card before launching. No crash yet [emoji16]

Tomas Wangen · Jan 29, 2018

The p4p handles up to 4k at 30fps without noticeable quality loss. 60fps effectively looses half the resolution and is therefore more or less unusable.

30 as compared to 24 allows for slightly faster motion without jittering (well known from cinema during panning motions).

This footage is all 4k / 30 / h265 / iso100 / dcinelike/ f/5.6 shot with and without nd filter (most but not all footage around 1/60 sec).

This amount of motion, especially when close to the ground, would be slightly problematic with 24fps.

PhantomWetSuits · Jan 29, 2018

"60fps effectively looses half the resolution and is therefore more or less unusable."
That footage was really clean , beautiful shots, but I am struggling with this comment about losing half the resolution, as this should be gaining quality at 60 fps for slow motion footage not losing, what am I missing. ?

OOO · Jan 29, 2018

Tomas Wangen said:
The p4p handles up to 4k at 30fps without noticeable quality loss. 60fps effectively looses half the resolution and is therefore more or less unusable.

30 as compared to 24 allows for slightly faster motion without jittering (well known from cinema during panning motions).

This footage is all 4k / 30 / h265 / iso100 / dcinelike/ f/5.6 shot with and without nd filter (most but not all footage around 1/60 sec).

This amount of motion, especially when close to the ground, would be slightly problematic with 24fps.

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Very clean and beautiful footage. I really enjoyed every second of it. I usually record at 4K@60 FPS and upload at 4K@30 FPS. I love to fly in tight spots, close to the ground/water/ice and often do a lot of panning. Although I fly relatively slow when I close to the ground but still see too much jittering. Now I understand why it happens. It seems that the best solution is to go/pan very very slow and record at 4K@30 FPS. Do you see any improvement in quality with h265?

Data per frame per second = 100 Mb/60 vs. 100 Mb/30 [emoji106][emoji106]

Tomas Wangen · Jan 30, 2018

PhantomWetSuits said:
"60fps effectively looses half the resolution and is therefore more or less unusable."
That footage was really clean , beautiful shots, but I am struggling with this comment about losing half the resolution, as this should be gaining quality at 60 fps for slow motion footage not losing, what am I missing. ?

There has earlier been posted results of tests indicating that only every second horizontal line is scanned when sampling from 60fps captures causing slight softness of the picture. This is only evident when inspecting at 4K but results in a slight overall muddyness that caused me to only try this for one session. The reason is most likely limitations somewhere in the hardware image path.

Tomas Wangen · Jan 30, 2018

OOO said:
Very clean and beautiful footage. I really enjoyed every second of it. I usually record at 4K@60 FPS and upload at 4K@30 FPS. I love to fly in thighs spots, close to the ground/water/ice and often do a lot of panning. Although I fly relatively slow when I close to the ground but still see too much jittering. Now I understand why it happens. It seems that the best solution is to go/pan very very slow and record at 4K@30 FPS. Do you see any improvement in quality with h265?

Data per frame per second = 100 Mb/60 vs. 100 Mb/30 [emoji106][emoji106]

I find a slight edge of h265/100 as compared to h264/100 (slightly more high frequency detail) but the improvement is minimal.

bsartist · Jan 30, 2018

Tomas Wangen said:
I find a slight edge of h265/100 as compared to h264/100 (slightly more high frequency detail) but the improvement is minimal.

But isn’t there an improvement is file size? I thought that was a big H.265 benefit?

Tomas Wangen · Jan 30, 2018

bsartist said:
But isn’t there an improvement is file size? I thought that was a big H.265 benefit?

H265 is theoretically much more efficient than h264. However, real-time (single pass) encoding is difficult (processor intensive) and the dji implementation is not perfect / could be better.

We therefore end up with slightly better quality at the same filesize.

OOO · Jan 31, 2018

Here is one of my video recorded at 4K@50 fps and uploaded at 4K@25 fps. Despite flying slow I’m not happy with the final quality. I can’t exactly describe what is wrong (except jittering) but I didn’t like it.

bsartist · Jan 31, 2018

OOO said:
Here is one of my video recorded at 4K@50 fps and uploaded at 4K@25 fps. Despite flying slow I’m not happy with the final quality. I can’t exactly describe what is wrong (except jittering) but I didn’t like it.

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I didn’t notice any jittering watching it on my iPhone. Maybe on a bigger screen. How are you editing? I got jittering on one of my videos once because it was shot at 29.97fps but I mistakenly created my project timeline in FCPX at 23.97fps. Ugly jitteryness esp on turns. I redid the project at 29.97 and it smoothed right out.

OOO · Jan 31, 2018

bsartist said:
I didn’t notice any jittering watching it on my iPhone. Maybe on a bigger screen. How are you editing? I got jittering on one of my videos once because it was shot at 29.97fps but I mistakenly created my project timeline in FCPX at 23.97fps. Ugly jitteryness esp on turns. I redid the project at 29.97 and it smoothed right out.

I use FCPX for editing. This one was recorded at 4K@50 fps and edited at 4K@25 fps. In my last 2 flight I recorded/compressed at 4K@30 fps and the quality seems way better.

bsartist · Jan 31, 2018

OOO said:
I use FCPX for editing. This one was recorded at 4K@50 fps and edited at 4K@25 fps. In my last 2 flight I recorded/compressed at 4K@30 fps and the quality seems way better.

Why edit at a different framerate than you shot at? I think they may cause some jittering problems. At least it did for me.

OOO · Jan 31, 2018

bsartist said:
Why edit at a different framerate than you shot at? I think they may cause some jittering problems. At least it did for me.

It definitely reduce the quality. Thus I have already changed my routine recording practice. Now I record and edit at 30 FPS. Spending 100 Mb/s data for 30 frames, instead of 60 or 50 frames seems very logical explanation to me.

bsartist · Jan 31, 2018

OOO said:
It definitely reduce the quality. Thus I have already changed my routine recording practice. Now I record and edit at 30 FPS. Spending 100 Mb/s data for 30 frames, instead of 60 or 50 frames seems very logical explanation to me.

Yes I have read that higher frame rates reduce the effective resolution.

bsartist · Jan 31, 2018

For grins, have a look at this footage where I proved out this problem. Jump to 25 seconds and focus on the A frame house in each.

It’s the same footage that was shot at 29.97 FPS. But the first one was laid into a project created at 23.97 FPS. Jittery. The second one I dropped the footage into a project created at 29.97 FPS - matching the original footage. Smoooooth.

Tomas Wangen · Jan 31, 2018

OOO said:
Here is one of my video recorded at 4K@50 fps and uploaded at 4K@25 fps. Despite flying slow I’m not happy with the final quality. I can’t exactly describe what is wrong (except jittering) but I didn’t like it.

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You should probably stick to these framerates:

24 if you want that cinematic look (or for use with other 24fps footage)
30 as this is the highest quality option for p4p
60 if you need to either slow down footage or need a 60fps production. This has as only downside the reduced quality

25 and 50 only made sense in the old analog days where the electric net was 50hz in most of europe and we had crt tvs where interference could be a problem. These have no advantages today and really should be avoided (the exception would be if you intend to use with other footage at that framerate).

Your footage has high motion and would benefit from two things; higher framerate (again 30 or maybe 60) and also some motion blur. 30 fps shot at 1/60 second would be ideal.