I was about to get a Mavic pro but think the Air may be better. Making fishing videos so portability appeals to me.
The Air captures 4k at 100Mb/s vs 60Mb/s on the Pro which should result in better quality.
Specs state H.264 MP4/MOV but no mention of LOG options etc like the Pro.
Also was hoping for H.265 (HEVC) like Phantom 4 and GoPro now have. H.265 produces better quality than H.264 at the same bitrate plus half the file size. Also H.265 8 bit supports HDR.
What options are available and waht would produce the best quality image for editing (I use DaVinci Resolve)??
All thought appreciated.
Thanks

Yes, the Air will capture 4k with more detail in the compressed areas of each frame than the Pro because it has a higher bitrate. I don't know what bitrates the other modes are using but if you compare the available bits per frame against the Pro, the 4k will be a marked improvement.
If you capture at 4k and are outputting at 1080p, downscaling from 4k you will get video quality thats almost twice as good as the same shot on the Mavic at 4k and downscaled.



Fortunately it does have D-LOG as a picture profile. Hopefully they have resolved the noise reduction issue the Pro has when shooting with a sharpness of 0,-1,-2 and -3. Basically it creates mushy areas. If you are using +1 the NR is turned off and you get a nice sharp image but at the expense of a little noise and from experience anything below iso 400 is totally manageable.

So to answer your question based on the limited knowledge I have of the Air's video capturing specs. I would say for the best quality image the Air wins for sure.
For editing 4k at high bitrates you might need to transcode your footage using a codec that takes the pressure off the decoder such as Apple-ProRes and (assuming the Air will use inter-frame compression) convert it to intra-frame. The only downside to this is filesize. The clips will be quite large. Oh and then you might need to create proxy media, depending on how well specced out your machine is.

Hope this helps

Thanks Malakai
I'm using Win 10 but can transcode to DNx or Cineform to edit in Resolve
If I can get quality as good as or maybe better than the Pro in a drone half the size and cheaper seems the Air is the only way to go.
Will it be good enough for HD TV broadcast?

What about MOV vs MP4 - which is better quality for editing?
Thanks

Yeah, if I hadn't long got my Pro I would be buying the Air right now. For my content and audience, the higher bitrates wont make any difference. It wont be noticed.
Think back to when the Pro came out with all its 4k glory. No one noticed anything then, show a normie something captured in 4k from the Pro and they are blown away.

As for being good enough for HDTV broadcast. Content captured using D-LOG (allows more data to be captured in the shadows) @ 4k, 100Mbps, downscaled to 1080p@100Mbps with some great color grading will look amazing.
The only caveat being the HDTV broadcast stream limitations. I think the maximum bitrate is 19Mbps total per stream and for 1080p, most broadcasters use around 12Mbps.
Because of this your video will lose a great deal of quality at broadcast because going from 100Mbps to 12-19Mbps is a reduction in quality of about 79-88% to the original.

As you are editing on PC and not using an apple environment, capture using MP4. More info here.

Thanks again
I understand HDTV broadcast stream also uses MPEG2.  What do they require (quality/format) for edited source video before they downgrade for broadcast?
Can't afford a DJI Inspire 2 Cinema Premium Combo $20K  

MOV and MP4 are more or less the same. Some say if you use a Mac use MOV but otherwise use MP4, I'm fairly sure neither one has any drastic difference in terms of file sizes or encoding.

As for the original post, I was under the impression that HDR in videos requires 10bit colour profile which I'm sure these drones don't have. All my UHD blurays which are HDR use the 10bit profile, if downgraded to 8bit they lose the HDR .

Peejay1977 Posted at 2018-1-25 04:23
MOV and MP4 are more or less the same. Some say if you use a Mac use MOV but otherwise use MP4, I'm fairly sure neither one has any drastic difference in terms of file sizes or encoding.

As for the original post, I was under the impression that HDR in videos requires 10bit colour profile which I'm sure these drones don't have. All my UHD blurays which are HDR use the 10bit profile, if downgraded to 8bit they lose the HDR .

Yes, they are two very similar containers. MOV allows for more types of information to be stored and saves the audio and video separately. MP4 was made for MPEG-4 video so has less overheads however MOV will be easier to recover on a Mac should corruption occur. The content will be virtually identical whichever you choose.  

FishyAl Posted at 2018-1-25 03:48
Thanks again
I understand HDTV broadcast stream also uses MPEG2.  What do they require (quality/format) for edited source video before they downgrade for broadcast?
Can't afford a DJI Inspire 2 Cinema Premium Combo $20K

I dont know enough about this to answer your question. There might be others here that can though

Peejay1977 Posted at 2018-1-25 04:23
MOV and MP4 are more or less the same. Some say if you use a Mac use MOV but otherwise use MP4, I'm fairly sure neither one has any drastic difference in terms of file sizes or encoding.

As for the original post, I was under the impression that HDR in videos requires 10bit colour profile which I'm sure these drones don't have. All my UHD blurays which are HDR use the 10bit profile, if downgraded to 8bit they lose the HDR .

Latest Intel iGPUs have encoding and decoding of 4K H.265 (HEVC) 8 bit HDR 4:2:0. Not sure how it works as I also thought HDR needs 10 bit 4:2:2. Also BT2020 color support.  
According to Wiki H.265 HEVC "The Main 10 profile allows for improved video quality since it can support video with a higher bit depth than what is supported by the Main profile.[139] Additionally, in the Main 10 profile 8-bit video can be coded with a higher bit depth of 10-bits, which allows improved coding efficiency compared to the Main profile."

Oddly enough the New Phantom 4 Pro with the 1" sensor supports H.265 - bur HDR is not mentioned.

Im fairly sure that the HDR refers to the pictures not the video. True HDR would require H265 10Bit encoding natively which I don’t think even the Inspire supports.