Bitrate: Is 60 Mbps enough?

[xybe]

I am still mulling over the purchase of DJI's latest offering but I am not too happy with the way detail is resolved, in the videos I checked so fat it looks that it barely takes advantage of 1080p but does not preserve enough detail to be called a truly 4k camera.

It seems that when the video is compressed some detail is lost in the process, this is especially noticeable in scenes with hard lighting where there is little movement and/or the subject is not very close to the camera. The image is chunky, not blurred so I think the lenses are doing their job.

Perhaps the problem does not lie with the bitrate figure but with the compression algorithms used by the camera. Is it likely that this could be improved with an eventual firmware upgrade?

Would anyone please care to chime in regarding the loss of detail incurred with video compression?

 

[HunterSK]

I think of it as being comparable to the GoPro 4 Black, 60Mbps bit rate using the H.264 codec.

Probably not to the level of professional cinema cameras but this is a $500 GoPro-equivalent we're talking about not a $60k Arri Alexa or even a $1k Panasonic GH4.

Still much better than the Phantom Vision+ which was only 13Mbps in 1080p.

The next few years we should get an improvement in image quality once H.265 (HEVC) is adopted by industry in future cameras. Double the subjective image quality for the same bitrate.

 

[nabilriaz]

I think of it as being comparable to the GoPro 4 Black, 60Mbps bit rate using the H.264 codec.

Probably not to the level of professional cinema cameras but this is a $500 GoPro-equivalent we're talking about not a $60k Arri Alexa or even a $1k Panasonic GH4.

Still much better than the Phantom Vision+ which was only 13Mbps in 1080p.

The next few years we should get an improvement in image quality once H.265 (HEVC) is adopted by industry in future cameras. Double the subjective image quality for the same bitrate.

yes I totally agree, GH4 is 2K with lens 2.4K though

 

[xybe]

Thank you guys, after seeing these videos from Tahoe Ed. I believe the camera falls squarely in the category of "good enough", particularly in the "good-enough-for-anything-I-might-shoot-in-the-foreseeable-future" subcategory

Here is some unedited 4K video for your review.

http://dji.serveftp.org/VIDEO/Inspire4Ksample.zip
http://dji.serveftp.org/VIDEO/Inspire4Ksample_opposite_angle.zip