New Mavic to be Announced in March P5???
- Thread starter bkushner
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Mavic pro was released two months before P4P, so perhaps May? This would ofcourse at best be pure speculation at this point.
Or, they could let the Mavic have its day without competing against the Phantom and then DJI could bring out the new Phantom, perhaps the P5, in September/October and kill the Christmas season.
Brian
Brian
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It should be any day now!
Reason I know is because I just caved and bought a P4Pro Obsidian because I had more & more work coming in and couldn’t wait any longer. Haha
Reason I know is because I just caved and bought a P4Pro Obsidian because I had more & more work coming in and couldn’t wait any longer. Haha
They need to fix all these firmware problems before anymore drones come out!!!!!
The biggest firmware problems the Phantom 4 Pro has, in my opinion, is related to image processing and not so much to flight control. There are the occasional flight control issues, of course, and I'd like to see those addressed, but for me the biggest day-in and day-out problem is the image processing. I think, however, that it isn't just the firmware that's the problem but also marginal hardware for image processing. I think the CPU's they use are just not fast enough to handle the workload and at times they seem to screw up because of it. Hopefully, with 18-24 months between Phantom reboots the CPU's will have improved enough to handle 4K60 H.265 at, say, 150Mbps WITHOUT dropping frames or introducing image tearing artifacts that we now have. With 18-24 months it should be possible to see such image processing CPU's operating at smaller feature size able to handle the greater workload without skipping a beat and able to do all that within the same or lower power budget.
But, although MY emphasis is mostly on the image processing I'd still like to see improvements in flight control and in particular the elimination of the Go 4 App closing in flight problem I've had twice since June. If they could improve the quality of the video downlink that would be sweet -- getting 1080P at higher bitrate would make seeing what you're doing that much easier -- and safer.
The next thing I'd like to see and I doubt it will be possible for the next Phantom would be an increase in camera bit-depth to 10-bit or even 12-bit -- that would significantly improve DR and reduce banding. But, my sense is that's probably a good 3-4 years away or even longer.
Brian
But, although MY emphasis is mostly on the image processing I'd still like to see improvements in flight control and in particular the elimination of the Go 4 App closing in flight problem I've had twice since June. If they could improve the quality of the video downlink that would be sweet -- getting 1080P at higher bitrate would make seeing what you're doing that much easier -- and safer.
The next thing I'd like to see and I doubt it will be possible for the next Phantom would be an increase in camera bit-depth to 10-bit or even 12-bit -- that would significantly improve DR and reduce banding. But, my sense is that's probably a good 3-4 years away or even longer.
Brian
The P4P does drop frames when trying to record 4096X2160 @ 60FPS., but if you record 3840X2160@60FPS, it's doesn't drop frames. That's likely a hardware limitation because DJI hasn't been able to fix it. It's interesting that they removed 4096X2160 @ 60FPS from their spec for a while, and now they have it back in the spec, as if it's fixed. P4P will never do 4096X2160 @ 60FPS with H.265, that's clear a hardware limitation.
P5 will likely have Ocu-sync, a version which does support 1080 downlinks at short distances, similar to Inspire2.
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I had not seen that, very interesting if true. Even more interesting if it winds up with 10-bit.
Brian
My P4P drops frames at 3840x2160@30fps, usually at a file boundary but sometimes in the middle of a 4GB file. The consequence of that is image tearing as I've demonstrated in a number of video including this one.
So, hopefully the H2 processor will not be as marginal as the H1 appears to be and the artifacts I and others see will be a thing of the past.
I should add, if this is the most significant upgrade to the Phantom I would not expect the cost to go up much given the cost for the processor should be about the same. After nearly 2 years the improvements that semiconductor manufacturing permit with smaller feature sizes result in more performance at the same price or the same performance at a lower price. It is not unlikely that DJI may look to up-market the Phantom now that they have several lower end models but I'd not put it past them to keep the same $1500USD price tag.
Brian
I've never seen an issue with drop frames when recording at 3840X2160@60FPS, even at the file boundary. It's as smooth as glass when I stitch two files together. I have other friends with P4Ps that don't have dropped frames with their P4P, as long as they are recording in 3840X2160@60FPS.
I assume you have tried different SD cards, correct?
4096X2160 @ 60FPS is a different story, the H/W can't handle it IMO. However I don't need this higher resolution, so I'm OK with it.
If your craft is in warranty, I suggest you send your video samples to DJI and ask for camera replacement. That's not acceptable IMO.
I have not done extensive testing of other uSD cards but have used top quality Sandisk and Samsung cards with the same defect. The main card is a Sandisk 128GB Extreme Plus V30 U3 SDXC I, which is several times faster than needed to handle the bit-rate. I have also used a Samsung Evo 64GB SDXC I U3 card though I have not used that card very much. I think I should do another round of testing to confirm the card, but, once again, the specs and performance of the Sandisk card are several times better than needed.
Brian
Those cards should work fine, however testing a second SD is a good idea just to confirm you don't have a substandard card by chance. If you continue to drop frames with both cards at 3840X2160@60FPS using H.264, I suggest asking DJI for a new camera. That shouldn't happen.
The problem of identifying the cause is aggravated by the fact that I'm using Premiere Pro to view it and Adobe changes things up periodically. In fact, earlier today I loaded in a couple raw files to look at the dropped frames issue again and instead of 1 or 2 missing frames I now see 26 missing frames -- Adobe just recently updated PP and a few other apps so I can't be sure if what I'm seeing is Adobe related or DJI related except to note I do not see this dropped frame issue on any other camera I have and I have about half a dozen. It would be nice to be able to use a tool that you know doesn't alter the frames in any way and with Adobe I can't be so certain.
Brian
Oh man, don't get me started about PP CC 2018, I'm having nothing but problems. I'm unsure if it's a hardware problem or an Adobe issue. My computer is a brand new 6 core i7 from Alienware (DELL) with a GTX1080TI GPU, 1TB SSD and 16GB DRAM. It should be fine, and it did work fine for a week with PP CC, then it went wacky. Uninstalled and reinstalled, no joy. Installed last year's PP CC 2017 and that worked fine for a week, then it went wacky after a week with different problems. No, I'm not happy with PP!
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Yeah, I guess what I'd like to see is a tool the video engineers might have to view a video, frame-by-frame, without altering anything. If there is such a tool, and I have to believe video engineers would, I'd love to get my hands on it.
Adobe likes to change stuff up with no notice and often the changes completely change the way you need to do something. The biggest thing they messed with about a year ago was the "title maker" -- now that I kind of know how to use it its not so bad, but I was totally lost at first and had to find videos to walk me through it.
Brian
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