Poor Quality Video at 60 fps 1080p

Joined
May 14, 2016
Messages
159
Reaction score
53
I shot some 1080p 60 fps video on my Phantom 4 (P4) and was very disappointed by the quality. It looked blurry as if over compressed. I’m wondering if others have run into this, if it’s a well known problem, or...

Here’s my thinking about it all: I understand that P4 max video throughput is 60 Mbps. (Page 60 of the manual, last line says “Max. Bitrate Of Video Storage 60 Mbps“.) Using the Movie Inspector in QuickTime I see that the data rate of 1080p at 30 fps I shot on my P4 is about 40 Mbps. Assuming that’s true then the data rate at 60 fps would require twice that of 30 fps, or about 80 Mbps throughput in order to achieve the same level of quality. Have I got that right?

When I shoot at 1080p, 60 fps and inspect the throughput using the Inspector in QuickTime I see that the data rate is 60 Mbps. In other words, 20 Mbps is being lost because you can’t fit 80 Mbps through a 60 Mbps pipe. This could well explain the over compressed look of 1080p 60 fps P4 video: the P4 is taking the 80 Mbps stream and compressing it to fit into the 60 Mbps pipe. I haven’t shot any 120 fps 1080p. After seeing how poor the 60 fps 1080p looks I don’t see the point. At 720p, 60 fps the video looks fine. The data throughput at that resolution is only about 20 Mbps.

Can others confirm or refute my thinking please? I want to be sure I’ve got this right.

Thanks.
 
1080p_60fps_screenshot.jpg
That's not doable. 5 seconds is about 50 megabytes. I will include a screen capture, however. You can see pretty clearly the rather poor quality. Be sure to look at it at 100% magnification, full size. I was able to do that by right clicking on the image above and copying it to the clipboard, then pasting it into a new PhotoShop document.

Meanwhile has anybody else shot at 1080p 60 fps?
 
Last edited:
I don't see much wrong with that picture-quality, even less when considering the poor light conditions it was shot in


Sent from my iPad using PhantomPilots mobile app
 
I don't see much wrong with that picture-quality, even less when considering the poor light conditions it was shot in


Sent from my iPad using PhantomPilots mobile app

If you're not looking at the image full size it will look better than it actually is.

Trust me, as a professional photographer with over 50 years experience in the business the quality of the image I posted is quite poor, and there was nothing about the lighting that would have caused this. [Edit: maybe there is some truth to what you're saying after all.] Please look again and make sure you're looking at 100% magnification. I'm not sure viewing on an iPad would allow you to see the image at 100%.

Maybe I expect too much from video footage. My expertise is in still photography where an image with the quality of the one I posed above would be completely unacceptable.
 
Last edited:

Members online

No members online now.

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,358
Members
104,936
Latest member
hirehackers