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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

DJI and Epic Dragon

Kyle Dones

Kyle Dones

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Had a video shoot with DJI 4k drone and Epic Dragon and 5dmkiii. the DJI footage in post was pixelated and never corrected.

Im not going to point fingers at any body on my production, however I'd like to know why the drone footage appeared that way.

I was told that the drone footage and the r3d and 5d footage had to be transcoded first before editing to match...I find that hard to believe.

Any body run into this problem? Any body got a remedy?
 
When you say DJI 4K drone do you mean Phantom 3 or Inspire? If so, the footage from both is action cam quality and only barely acceptable for most serious uses. Personally I would never try to cut Inspire footage with Red footage because it is a bad choice all around.
 
I've cut Inspire footage with epic and they work just fine together. As long as it's properly exposed the inspire camera is astoundingly good looking for what it is. If your inspire footage is wonky, get ahold of the original footage and see where it went wrong in the processing.

nick
 
Well, I wouldn't say that. A great shot is a great shot regardless of what is is shot on. If you can get some great shots on an inspire then you are winning. It doesn't replace a red or anything else. No one has ever looked at an inspire shot I showed them and complained about the image quality. Quite the opposite. I like the inspire because You can have it out of the case and shooting in 5 mins. You can accelerate faster than a bigger rig with a heavier camera, it's less mass to throw around, and that means less risk to everyone. The guys at DJI hit a home run with that little rig. It's so damn smart. I tore my big rig apart after I got the inspire. Hell, even Nerdo the DIT is impressed buy the images.

It ain't no epic, but it ain't trying to be ;-)

nick
 
cool so no one knows. thanks
 
The Inspire package has a lot of groundbreaking features. Given 5 minutes and two bananas, I could teach a monkey to operate it. I have a love/hate relationship with it. For every great shot it's given, it's crappy pseudo 4K camera has blown a potentially great shot opportunity due to aliasing, artifacting or flicker from not having B frame encoding within DJI's version of H.264. It's time consuming in post to get the noise down to something tolerable.

If the project is for web, the Inspire is all good. If it's for something more significant, cutting it with Red footage is a bad call. Most people think of aerial shots as non-essential extras. They are the first thing to get cut from a production with a tight budget or are given low priority, like in this case.
 
Antony Newman said:
Kyle,

I am not an expert in this area; However a before and after snapshot of the footage would enable informed feedback of the issue (rather than speculative guesswork).

AJ
Click to expand...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H8mPFO0PCY

i don't remember where it starts but 1:43 is a good example of the pixelation. The drone operator sent me another video with same camera set up and there was no issue. The post team is good too but no one knows what happened.
 
Wendell Adkins said:
When you say DJI 4K drone do you mean Phantom 3 or Inspire? If so, the footage from both is action cam quality and only barely acceptable for most serious uses. Personally I would never try to cut Inspire footage with Red footage because it is a bad choice all around.
Click to expand...

Inspire
 
I've read that the aliasing could be just from the cameras lack of capability

the SD card isn't fast enough

the editing software can't handle 4k

the monitor can't handle playback

But i don't think any of those are correct again because of previous footage. I also works with the same drone and operator for some establishing shots for a short and there was no issue. The work flow was the same. Also for that take where the aliasing occurs, I believe it was a take when I had the drone on manual mode to control exposure and right when I hit record, the camera switched to auto exposure. The operator said it does that. wonder if a codec setting was changed as well.

would love to hear if anyone has ran into a similar issue and how to troubleshoot…I don't care if you guys sell your reds and buy go pros…go post about that elsewhere.
 
You really need to look at the whole pipeline as to how you got from the Inspire footage to wahtever you mastered in. If you had 3 different formats, then you had to at some point make them the same which is probably where your problem lies, but it could be any one of a 100 things. It's a question for a more post intensive guy than me.

Nick
 
Make sure you have ND filters on in high light, footage from phantom 3 looks Soooo much better when at a proper 180 degree shutter. It kinda blows my mind that DJI does not reinforce this and sell ND set for the P3. They sell the inspire with one ND, but thats just not going to cut it.
 
If you truly want help I would caution against lecturing people regarding their replies. If I want to respectfully disagree with Nick, i will.

Why is an aerial shot of less value than a ground shot? There are many people (like us) who can fly higher quality cameras if you take time to find them. I have three minor projects that I am trying to salvage Inspire footage on right now. I have ten aerial rigs but used the Inspire on these because it was quick and easy. Turns out I am paying for quick and easy with a bunch of time in post so it's now a net loss in time. I honestly only bought the Inspire for people who are more concerned with cost than quality. One clip has horrible noise in just one high contrast piece of the sky for example.

My experience so far has been if everything is optimum, you can get decent footage. If not, it quickly goes south with little margin for error in post.

I have had decent results at times running the footage through DJI's transcoder off their website download page. If you haven't tried that you might give it a go.
 
Daniel Kelly Brown said:
Make sure you have ND filters on in high light, footage from phantom 3 looks Soooo much better when at a proper 180 degree shutter. It kinda blows my mind that DJI does not reinforce this and sell ND set for the P3. They sell the inspire with one ND, but thats just not going to cut it.
Click to expand...

I have had problems with Inspire footage using both 180 shutter or other. In general, many of the reasons for using the 180 degree rule don't apply to aerial filming to the same extent as ground shots. This is because distance from objects and camera motion are often very different from the air versus the ground relating to motion blur considerations.
 
Wendell Adkins said:
I have had decent results at times running the footage through DJI's transcoder off their website download page. If you haven't tried that you might give it a go.
Click to expand...

now where was that before, Wendall? lol….and if I want to express my frustration in my own thread by trying to stick to the point…I will. thanks Wendall! I'll give it shot even though the video dropped already.
 
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