Should I compress Mavic Mini videos? How?

[Peter Petrov]

Hello,

I'm new to drones and shooting videos with drones, so I'd like to know what you, more experienced folks, do with your videos. Do you:

A) keep the video files the way they are (original format and file size) in order to keep maximum quality;

or

B) do some sort of compression with a reasonable trade-off between quality loss and file size.

Let's take an example. I've done a circle quickshot with my Mavic Mini in 2.7K. The video is 23 sec. long and takes up 120MB. Now I want to share it and also keep it in my archive. Do I:
A) share the file via WhatsApp, or whatever app one's using, as is - after all 120 MBs is not that much nowadays;
B) compress the file for easier sharing, but keep the original file in order to be able to enjoy it in maximum quality on a bigger screen;
C) compress the file in a way, that will reduce the file size, but also keep the quality acceptable and then do with it whatever I want - sharing, long-term storage etc.

I understand, that probably the answer to my question would be - it depends. I want to know the general approach that you take with videos you've shot. Finally, if your answer involves some sort of compression - what software and settings do you use. I'm aware of two tools of compression:
- Handbrake HandBrake: Open Source Video Transcoder, which has a GUI
- ffmpeg FFmpeg, which is a command-line tool.

For both tools though I'm not sure which settings to use. I understand, that this is a broad topic, but maybe you could point me to some resources, containing hints and best practices.

Thank you very much for your answers.

Cheers,
Peter

 

[Elgreco3]

Hello,

I'm new to drones and shooting videos with drones, so I'd like to know what you, more experienced folks, do with your videos. Do you:

A) keep the video files the way they are (original format and file size) in order to keep maximum quality;

or

B) do some sort of compression with a reasonable trade-off between quality loss and file size.

Let's take an example. I've done a circle quickshot with my Mavic Mini in 2.7K. The video is 23 sec. long and takes up 120MB. Now I want to share it and also keep it in my archive. Do I:
A) share the file via WhatsApp, or whatever app one's using, as is - after all 120 MBs is not that much nowadays;
B) compress the file for easier sharing, but keep the original file in order to be able to enjoy it in maximum quality on a bigger screen;
C) compress the file in a way, that will reduce the file size, but also keep the quality acceptable and then do with it whatever I want - sharing, long-term storage etc.

I understand, that probably the answer to my question would be - it depends. I want to know the general approach that you take with videos you've shot. Finally, if your answer involves some sort of compression - what software and settings do you use. I'm aware of two tools of compression:
- Handbrake HandBrake: Open Source Video Transcoder, which has a GUI
- ffmpeg FFmpeg, which is a command-line tool.

For both tools though I'm not sure which settings to use. I understand, that this is a broad topic, but maybe you could point me to some resources, containing hints and best practices.

Thank you very much for your answers.

Cheers,
Peter

Bump. Also interested about this.

 

[pankul]

I think I have cracked the code on this .. I was able to compress my h265 60fps 4k recordings to 1/5 of their size with no visible quality loss to my eyes.

Interested ? It involves use of command line utility called ffmpeg

first download ffmpeg

Download FFmpeg

ffmpeg.org

then execute the following from a command prompt.
Your input file can be -> MP4 or MOV and encoded with either h264 or h265.

ffmpeg.exe -i yourfile.mp4 -copy_unknown -map_metadata 0 -c:v libx265 -crf 30 output.mp4

the output.mp4 (resultant file) will be much smaller and wont loose quality.
I would love for you all to try it and post the results.

I have a script that converts all my downloads from the SD card for my archival. Saves me storage space.

 

[Thomas B]

All compression involves deletion of portion of the compressed whatever.
I save videos full 4K, and images in both..DNG and jpeg. I dL to my hard drive once home and delete the files on the card.

 

[pankul]

Yes but we are talking about long term storage ... my 300+ GB videos from last 10 days are now stored as 60GB ... there is value in that ... by taking advantage of the codec h265.

Kinda like compressing your data files with ZIP

 

[DanMan32]

Yes but we are talking about long term storage ... my 300+ GB videos from last 10 days are now stored as 60GB ... there is value in that ... by taking advantage of the codec h265.

Kinda like compressing your data files with ZIP

Actually no. ZIP is a lossless compression. It has to because it is for data. You wouldn't want your spreadsheets dropping zeros!
The average lossless compression ratio is about 2 to 1, but can be much higher for data containing lots of repetition. Plain text for example.

Media however can be quite intelligible with a certain amount of loss. 4K@100Mbps already has compression but quite good.

 

[pankul]

with due respect, I do understand compression both for data, audio & video. I am also aware of Lossless vs lossy compression and its use cases. I am a computer science geek.

I was trying to help the original poster with his query.... suggesting what they are after is possible... I have compressed tons of videos using these tricks.

A job of a video CODEC is to effectively reduce the bits required to store the same amount of data with minimally perceivable loss.

consider this, just a decade ago a digital CD could hold about 10 songs, however a CD with MP3 compressed files could hold, 200-400 songs with same audio quality.

When the drone computer stores the data, it tries to use limited compression to preserve the processing for flight calculations.

A hobbyists who wants to store these videos long term, will benefit a lot by using a powerful desktop to re-encode / re-compress these videos of 100-140mbps bitrate to 30-35mbps. With advanced motion compression in h265 one can even encode with variable bitrate and achieve even better compression (with un noticed visible quality)

Disclaimer: Recompression of videos is a very very tedious task for your CPU, it will take time to encode. however gain in storage space is well worth it. Video playback is not a taxing job for your CPU/GPU. codecs are designed/optimized for playbacks.

Finally when you upload your video on you tube, they do the same thing... process and compress with minimal visible difference. That's what makes video streaming possible.

Fun reads ...

A Beginners Guide to Bitmaps

and

H.265 benchmarked: Does the next-generation video codec live up to expectations? - ExtremeTech

The first release of the open-source version of the H.265 encoder has dropped and we've got an early look at what the technology is capable of. H.265 supposedly offers vast bandwidth improvements at the same quality -- can it deliver?

www.extremetech.com

 

[pankul]

All compression involves deletion of portion of the compressed whatever.
I save videos full 4K, and images in both..DNG and jpeg. I dL to my hard drive once home and delete the files on the card.

JPG files are highly compressed bitmaps with lossy compression.

my inspiration was this article ... please review this ... and reconsider

How to compress GoPro movies (and keep metadata so that Quik is happy)

Do you have loads of GoPro movies eating up disk space? Looking for a way to compress them, but in such a way that quality is still very high and they continue to play nice with GoPro software, like Quik? I did too.

coderunner.io

 

[Kilrah]

I always keep the originals in addition to whatever edit I make for sharing. I do trim out the obviously useless bits of the originals though (losslessly, just remuxing).