There are no settings that will fix this. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. Mine is heading back to store for a full refund. What a waste of money.
terrible video quality with phantom 4
- Thread starter dave perry
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There are no settings that will fix this. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. Mine is heading back to store for a full refund. What a waste of money.
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Just so you know, the files that are MOV or MP4 are IDENTICAL. I mean literally binary wise, exact versions of themselves. They are both the h264 coded encoded on the fly with an AVC mpeg encoder.
MOV and MP4 are containers which hold the same exact file with the h264 codec as it pertains to the Phantom.
That said, it sounds like you may have a problem with your quicktime player. And if you are having the same problem in FCPX which also uses a version of quicktime for playback (well at least FCP 7 did, not 100% on X), then your problem is with the MOV and I don't know if it's on playback or on creation. I would reinstall quicktime and that's not an easy task if you want to erase all of the prefs and residual files for it and just deleting wont do that.
If you want to troubleshoot that it's not your quicktime player that's causing the problem, PM me and I'll check it on mine and see if there is a problem. If there is not, then it's your quicktime, if there is, then it's the bird somehow corrupting your MOV files but again, there is absolutely zero difference in the MP4 and the MOV. In an MP4 or MOV container you can house an AVID Uncompressed 10 bit raw file, an animation file, a ProRes HQ 444 file, and a million others including what we have, an h264 codec.
Excuse me if I am feeding you info that you already know but the bird encodes the file on the fly and puts it on your SD card in either a MOV or MP4, again with the h264 codec.
Either before encoding or after, it sounds like you are getting a corrupt quicktime file (MOV).
Codec is short for compress/decompress. Something bad is happening to your MOV files on either the compressing or the decompressing side of things.
Send me a 3 second bit of one of your files. Send me whatever is coming out of the bird. Shoot, you will have to bring it in to QT to *TRIM it though which might be compressing it. By any chance do you have a real short clip you can send me that you don't have to bring in to FCP or QT? An MOV that is.
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Again, any difference you are seeing with MOV and MP4 is 100% perceived. Unless there is an issue, as there seems to be, although I don't know where the issue is, but to me it sounds like it might just be a software issue with him however, your MOV h264 and your MP4 h264 are IDENTICAL. MOV and MP4 are containers.
Hey Jussaguy,
The problem seems kinda prominent with many other users. I don't think there is anyway of correcting the poor quality from these drones. DJI just has to come through and admit they may have f%&cked this model up big time.
The problem seems kinda prominent with many other users. I don't think there is anyway of correcting the poor quality from these drones. DJI just has to come through and admit they may have f%&cked this model up big time.
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I haven't downloaded the file yet, but what people should be doing is blowing up their h264s out of the bird into a ProRes 422 file, that way when they export out of their editing program, they don't lose a second generation. With h264 you get a large quality loss on the first generation, on the second you absolutely turn it to crap and then it needs to be processed by Vimeo or YouTube.
Don't send me a ProRes though. Send me one of your movs directly out of the bird, preferably one then never was touched by your quicktime or your FCP as it's possible that QT is corrupting your MOVs.
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I have two and have had zero problems with video quality, in fact I have had better than expected results although well documented on this site are other issues that I have been diligently going through and fixing. I am all over the forums. This one, RC Groups, DJI.com so I am well aware of what issues exist but more than a couple times I've fixed someone up in a situation like this one.
He has a unique issue in that he is getting what he perceives as a good image using MP4 and not MOV which lends itself to some possible other issues. So while keeping the issues into consideration, I am just working on what I'm being told. If the bird is producing quality imagery with an MP4 than maybe, just maybe, not for sure, there is another issue with the MOV or maybe it just wont encode MOVs right. I don't know but it's an easy troubleshoot. All I need it one of the MOV files.
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I went ahead and downloaded this and its 1080P at 25fps. Is that what you wanted?
Send me 4k at 24. The data rate is only 25 mbs and it's at 1080P so yeah, that's what it should look like. It's a little soft but nothing that a couple setting fixes wouldn't take care of. You should be able to get a much better picture out of it though. Please send me a 4k clip.
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Nobody CAN answer this question for you because you've taken the file and converted it to 1080p ProRes and no offense, but I have no idea what you're encoding skills are. You can say it looks like this out of the bird but I don't trust anyone but my eyes and a few others. If you can send me a d-log color space in an MOV that came directly out of the bird, and one that hopefully you haven't touched in QT or FCP, I can help you troubleshoot if it's the software or not.
I don't even know what your settings were when you recorded this. Maybe you had saturation jacked up, maybe you had a setting wrong. Honestly, you should reset all factory settings, go shoot a d-log 4k 5 second clip and send it to me and I'll tell you in a minute if you have a software or hardware issue.
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Ok, downloaded this one and it's definitely soft. There is a setting called "3D noise reduction" in the Go App now that I believe defaults to on, turn it off during the day. In fact, turn it off forever.
It looks like that noise is coming from that. Sorry for all these posts. You're gonna be inundated by my posts when you see them. Sorry, am just going through the thread one post at a time.
Turn off 3d noise reduction, send me a 4k file. Why are you sending 1080p files OOC?
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That's what I'm talking about, they are all over the place.
This ProRes one has about 115 mega bits while his MOV one only had about 25. So it's impossible to guess what settings were used for the encode but I want to see a 4k file.
I can't even tell anymore if that's what the 1080p stuff looks like because with the Phantom, I never use the 1080p setting because I think it looks like dog crap. 4K is by far the best looking setting on the bird. More so than the UHD format IMHO.
Does anyone on here claiming to have a fault free P4 have genuine footage that can make available to us all. I have a strong belief its a global issue. I am not doubting other owners, but i think DJI is telling us the whole story.
Jussa, i did the whole 3d noise reduction on and off and it still produced rubbish, new mem cards, mov, mp4, fiddled with picture settings, dog, dog cinema standard......= poor results.
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I have posted it twice in this thread now. I will do it again, but I am beginning to wonder if anyone is actually reading my posts. I need to go to bed. I'll edit this and link the video that I put up yesterday specifically for this thread and believe me, I have no love-loss. Ive had my own problems, just different ones. But again, I now have 2 P4s and video quality is not the problem with either of them. Am I getting what I would with a Sony A6 MK2? Of course not, but this is a DJI drone camera and the Sony costs twice as much and doesn't fly.
Maybe it was another thread. I need to go to bed Its 5:15 here.
4k D-Log video on it's third generation and without color correction and again, this video was not created for human consumption and was never intended to be seen.
My settings for both posted video were standard..nothing changed..as from out of the box. .
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4k D-Log video on it's third generation and without color correction and again, this video was not created for human consumption and was never intended to be seen.
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Why didn't you just upload the file straight from P4 to Youtube w/o the '2nd generation'.
When I look at the sample, I'd call that pretty mushy... might be just because you have sharpening at (-1), too soft for me, but it's definitely similar to the problems I'm having on mine. Maybe not quite as bad, but it's hard to account for what Youtube compression did to it. Any case, when you say 'I now have 2 P4s and video quality is not the problem with either of them.' I'd disagree, I'm getting more detail out of my P3P.
Why didn't you just upload the file straight from P4 to Youtube w/o the '2nd generation'.
When I look at the sample, I'd call that pretty mushy... might be just because you have sharpening at (-1), too soft for me, but it's definitely similar to the problems I'm having on mine. Maybe not quite as bad, but it's hard to account for what Youtube compression did to it. Any case, when you say 'I now have 2 P4s and video quality is not the problem with either of them.' I'd disagree, I'm getting more detail out of my P3P.
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Yea just saw that vid. It has it's issues with tilting noise and artifacts, but **** that SO MUCH SHARPER AND CLEANER than mine! Gonna use my RMA now...
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