I'm thinking about getting a Mavic Air, and looking at test footage. So far, all the footage I've seen seems to breaks down pretty severely when shooting foliage. This is common with cameras using low-bitrate encoding. Problem is, it seems to be happening even in footage that was recorded at lower resolutions or framerates. Ideally, one would be able to shoot at low rez/fps while still encoding at the highest bitrate, and capture better frames with less degradation in the details.

Not having a unit yet, and not seeing any reference in the manual, some questions:

- Does the configuration for Mavic Air let you specify video bitrate independent of resolution and framerate, or does it just select bitrate for you?
- If it selects bitrate for you, does it appear that, say, 2.7K/25 is recording at max bitrate of 100Mbps?
- If you can select/receive 100Mbps at such lower resolutions/fps, are you seeing the expected improvement in image quality?

Thanks to anyone who can clarify this.

I am surrounded with lots of trees where I live and with my Mavic Pro before, the foliage does collapse because of its low bitrate.

I'm happy to say that this is not the case with my Mavic Air. 4K gets me around 103 to 104 Mbps. Foliage does not collapse at all and I don't get pulsing footage like with my Mavic Pro. The videos that I have recorded in 4K with lots of foliage is really good.

With that being said, any resolution beliw 4K with Mavic Air you'll get a lower bitrate too. I too have asked this question before my MA arrived. Sadly, there is no settings to configure bitrate for every resolution. However, I only shoot in 4K anyway and I have no need for any other resolutions below that. I shoot in 4K, get 100+ Mbps then just downsize the resolution when exporting using Adobe Media Encoder and I export it with 105 Mbps to round the bitrate off.

Thanks. It's too bad you can't allocate more bandwidth with lower resolutions and framerates. The footage I've seen has the wooly texture I expect from low bitrate H.264.

I also shoot 4K and produce in 1080P, but that's coming from rock-solid RAW pixels. In the case of Mavic Air, I would gladly shoot 2.7k at half the pixels, still leaving plenty to crop in, if it meant I could dedicate the same 100Mbps to capturing more detail.

I'm sure that urban shots would look great, but people like to shoot nature with drones. Dirt, waves, leaves, grass just fall apart so easily under low bitrate, not to mention the effect of motion.

Kinda bummed, because my reaction to the footage I've seen reminds me when I first took my Canon 5D3 out to shoot video (w/o Magic Lantern). Man-mad stuff looked great, but the fractal natural world was terrible.

I hope to see examples of foliage not collapsing at all, though. Fingers crossed.

No Man's Drone Posted at 2018-2-15 14:57
I am surrounded with lots of trees where I live and with my Mavic Pro before, the foliage does collapse because of its low bitrate.

I'm happy to say that this is not the case with my Mavic Air. 4K gets me around 103 to 104 Mbps. Foliage does not collapse at all and I don't get pulsing footage like with my Mavic Pro. The videos that I have recorded in 4K with lots of foliage is really good.

What bitrate are you getting at 2.7K?