I've recently realized how important bitrate is. I noticed my P3S 2.7k footage was pretty horrible. I was hovering in front of several trees and all of the trees were just blobs of green pixels! The bitrate is not high enough to show all of the details!

Has anyone done tests to see what the optimal setting would be? I am thinking 1080P would offer the best picture in general. What do you guys use?

Could you happen to provide a sample of what you're getting via a file sharing site like DropBox? Have you ensured that your camera settings were correct?

Quality management when using a variable bit rate camera can be tricky, but there should not be a huge quality difference like what you described. To clarify, are you looking at the footage that's directly on the SD card, or the video that's cached on your phone? The latter is a lower 720p video format that correlates with the quality of your FPV during the flight using the Go app.

No, 2.7K will provide better pictures. Where are you viewing the pictures to make this judgement? If you are looking at the video on your phone or tablet, then forget it, the feed you are watching is only 720p and low bitrate. The real video is on the SD card in the aircraft.

What was the light like?
Was there movement and waht was your shutter speed?
There are lots of things that can affect your image quality.

I, like other posters, believe the OP is looking at the transmitted footage on his tablet/phone not the footage captured by the camera to the sd card. I film in 1080p and even at min distance and windy conditionsfrom trees have no issues making out leaves, bugs etc from the captured footage.

I've put a link to the video below. The video is off of the sd card not my phone. Please let me know if you guys see anything I should be doing differently!

Settings:

2.7k 30fps
1/60 shutter
ISO 100
D-Log color profile

I also have the contrast at -2, sharpening at -2, and saturation at -1. I've heard this is better for post production.

Video sample

Also, my critique is in the last 30 seconds or so of the video. When I'm coming down to land. And ignore my dorky hand movements....I was testing the video delay! haha

I would think that if bitrate was a problem, then using a lower resolution might be better, and 1080p looks pretty good to me even blown up on my 65 inch screen.

It seems you are using the MOV file format. Try using MP4, It's better. Mhh, for green pixel, I downloaded your video, but I don't see any green pixel, try using a different player. Or if you changed the SD Card, try using a faster Card.

~~ lolo'

I didn't see anything that was as you describe! Video footage was OK for me.

Video look fine to me.. I do not see what you describe...

loic2665 Posted at 2017-1-5 09:27
It seems you are using the MOV file format. Try using MP4, It's better. Mhh, for green pixel, I downloaded your video, but I don't see any green pixel, try using a different player. Or if you changed the SD Card, try using a faster Card.

~~ lolo'

mp4 or mov makes no difference to the video quality.

Labroides Posted at 2017-1-5 13:58
mp4 or mov makes no difference to the video quality.

Doesn't MOV require more bandwidth? And isn't possible it is hitting a bandwidth bottleneck which could affect MOV video quality?

BillW50 Posted at 2017-1-5 14:26
Doesn't MOV require more bandwidth? And isn't possible it is hitting a bandwidth bottleneck which could affect MOV video quality?

No, the MOV and MP4 containers are just like a tin to put the footage in, the major work of encoding has already been done and it exactly the same for both formats.

JasonT2013 Posted at 2017-1-5 06:44
I've put a link to the video below. The video is off of the sd card not my phone. Please let me know if you guys see anything I should be doing differently!

Settings:

I looked that footage and there is nothing wrong with it at all. This is your winter time, and whispy tree foliage makes it a bit harder to encode, but you have dialed down the sharpening, so did you not expect it would be less sharp?

When you says the foliage is just blobs, what are you using to view the footage? If you import that material into a good editing program and colour correct it, increase the sharpness, it will look just fine.

I notice you have used D-Log, if you are not experienced in colour correction, then it would be a good idea not to use D-Log, because it requires a lot of work to make it look good.

This isn't about bitrate or mp4/mov.
It's about compression.
The video is stored in a compressed format or the file size would by huge.
Compression loses some detail, but usually not enough to worry about.
But if you give the camera a difficult subject like a million leaves all of a similar colour, it is going to have a problem.
Look at 0:16-0:25 and you see that the camera has no problem with detail or resolution.
But look at 2:36 and it's a different matter
It's better at 2:49 when there are less than a million leaves to deal with

Well I'm happy I've learned something new! I like to understand my equipment's weaknesses and strengths!

As far as D-Log goes, I've done that as a suggestion I've heard of online. When I color grade, things do look better. Sharpness in post doesn't seems to improve things very much. Actually looks more noisy. I'm working in Premiere Pro and I have used the Sharpness slider in Lumetri Color with poor results. Maybe Unsharp mask would work better, but the render time seems to increase significantly. I'm going to turn up the sharpening on the drone 1 notch and see if things improve. I've also considered D-cinelike. But I guess that's for a different thread lol

As far as what I am viewing the footage on: I'm on a mid 2012 15" Macbook Pro. (non-retina) I am using Quicktime. I've used the space bar preview feature as well as fully opening the footage in QT.

Labroides Posted at 2017-1-5 13:58
mp4 or mov makes no difference to the video quality.

Hum, didn't want to put back a really old topic I didn't know why I said that... Old times I guess. ^^'