Heavy Pixelation on Tracking Shots

[Fourblade]

Will a better/faster SD card make any difference on the pixelation I'm getting when doing tracking shots over ground that has lots of fine detail?

The camera on the Phantom is set at 1080 30fps and is absolutely fine when moving slowly or sitting in the sky but as soon as you start to track at speed, say over a field then the pixelation is really heavy and very noticeable?

I'm loathed to drop to 720 so was wondering if a better card might make any difference or is it the limits of the camera and data stream?

 

[Fourblade]

Anyone?

 

[locoworks]

probably not make a difference would be my guess, i think it is a camera limitation rather than a card limitation

 

[paulajayne]

Faster card will not make it worse - so worth trying - slow down on the tracking shots, you can always speed up the footage if need be.

 

[HunterSK]

Will a better/faster SD card make any difference on the pixelation I'm getting when doing tracking shots over ground that has lots of fine detail?

The camera on the Phantom is set at 1080 30fps and is absolutely fine when moving slowly or sitting in the sky but as soon as you start to track at speed, say over a field then the pixelation is really heavy and very noticeable?

I'm loathed to drop to 720 so was wondering if a better card might make any difference or is it the limits of the camera and data stream?

Hi Fourblade,

The 'pixelation' you describe is because of the compression artifacts of the video stream seen because of the limited bitrate of the camera system.

The FC200 camera system appears to top out at ~13 Mbit/sec bitrate; for fast moving scenes it needs to cut down on detail to keep up with the amount of pixels moving/changing.

I haven't seen anyway to up this bitrate, unfortunately.

A faster SD card will likely not give you better quality as 13 Mbit/sec (or 1.6 MByte/sec) is well within the normal performance of even slow Class 4 SD cards. However, I always buy good quality high speed cards because they do allow faster transfers to your PC/Mac, even if the camera doesn't utilise it fully.

If you're exporting video to YouTube or file sharing sites, the bitrate of the final playback video is typically even less than the bitrate of the FC200 camera, so for that purpose what we have is probably 'good enough' for home videos and the like.

 

[Fourblade]

Hi Fourblade,

The 'pixelation' you describe is because of the compression artifacts of the video stream seen because of the limited bitrate of the camera system.
The FC200 camera system appears to top out at ~13 Mbit/sec bitrate; for fast moving scenes it needs to cut down on detail to keep up with the amount of pixels moving/changing. I haven't seen anyway to up this bitrate, unfortunately.
A faster SD card will likely not give you better quality as 13 Mbit/sec (or 1.6 MByte/sec) is well within the normal performance of even slow Class 4 SD cards. However, I always buy good quality high speed cards because they do allow faster transfers to your PC/Mac, even if the camera doesn't utilise it fully.
If you're exporting video to YouTube or file sharing sites, the bitrate of the final playback video is typically even less than the bitrate of the FC200 camera, so for that purpose what we have is probably 'good enough' for home videos and the like.

That's useful info thanks - I guess a true GoPro would cope better with the bitrate but our Phantom "DJI cam" isn't too bad for most projects.
I'll just have to track very gently in future..although it is tricky when flying low and tracking as there's more fine detail in the shot then.