Mavic 3 Slow Motion Capabilities

[Patman Droneography]

When I bought the Drone I didn't know how much I would actually use the "Slow Motion" features because I rarely did with my M2P. (Mostly because I like to post in 4k and the M2P didn't shoot 4k 120). After using it and seeing the kind of footage it could produce... Im addicted.

One thing I am kind of getting sick of is the constant need to fudge my way through the not so user friendly app. When in video mode, you can click on the bottom right and change the camera settings including the framerate in which you want to shoot. I don't even want to admit how long it took me to find out how to shoot in slow mo. Why wouldn't they just put it on that same slider so you could quickly go from shooting 60fps to 120fps instead of making it a completely different / special mode?

P.S. the whole controller and app layout is going to get its own video. I feel like there have been so many setbacks between the M2P and the M3... or maybe I'm just getting old and don't want to learn a new system.

Direct Link To Video

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[Phantomrain.org]

Well done, that slow motion footage come out beautiful , another Star rating for the Mavic 3.

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly your Mavic 3 in the Rain.

 

[GFields]

Greetings from Birmingham Alabama, welcome to the forum!

 

[canadian drone videos]

When I bought the Drone I didn't know how much I would actually use the "Slow Motion" features because I rarely did with my M2P. (Mostly because I like to post in 4k and the M2P didn't shoot 4k 120). After using it and seeing the kind of footage it could produce... Im addicted.

One thing I am kind of getting sick of is the constant need to fudge my way through the not so user friendly app. When in video mode, you can click on the bottom right and change the camera settings including the framerate in which you want to shoot. I don't even want to admit how long it took me to find out how to shoot in slow mo. Why wouldn't they just put it on that same slider so you could quickly go from shooting 60fps to 120fps instead of making it a completely different / special mode?

P.S. the whole controller and app layout is going to get its own video. I feel like there have been so many setbacks between the M2P and the M3... or maybe I'm just getting old and don't want to learn a new system.

Direct Link To Video

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Just wait, in January the update will give us 200 FPS in 1080, like you I’m addicted to slow mo. Ya it took me a while to figure out the Fly app, not gonna lie lol.

 

[Roamer105]

Why using lower frame rates? - what if I want to do slow motion?

Aside from the ability to use longer exposure times which may be advantageous at times probably the most important reason is the amount of compression necessary to store the video stream. Some simple arithmetic demonstrates this:

Ignoring various YUV formats for this discussion, a single 4K video frame (10-bit RGB video) generates 2160*3840*(3*10 bits per pixel) or 248,832,000 (248.832 Megabits) of (raw) data. This is just one frame. At 120 FPS, this results in 29.85984 GIGA BITS or 3.73248 Giga Bytes of (raw) data in a single second. The M3 records 120 FPS of 4K at 200 Mb/sec. Hence to store that video requires an 18.66 : 1 compression. Thanks to H265 and fast processors it is possible to accomplish this with little perceptible loss of detail - yet loss of detail nevertheless. In contrast, if the M3 would (I don't think it does) record let's say 30 FPS at the same rate, the amount of loss would be four times less - or effectively four times more detail! I don't have an M3 (yet) so I can't say for sure but I think it records that lower frame rate at a considerably lower writing speed - probably closer to 100 Mb/sec. But even at that lower rate we still expect twice the amount of detail information to be retained.

Do lower frame rates make it very impossible to produce good slow motion video? On the surface, the answer is yes. However, there is a compromise one should consider. While shooting and recording video we are limited by the processing power and writing speed limits of the drone. However, in post processing the sky is the limit - well, maybe not quite, but for sure processing time is not important and compute power is much greater.

Case-in-point: Here is a clip I shot with an A2S in 10-bit 4K (HLG) video at 23.976 FPS recorded at a measly 100 Mb/sec (which still produces twice the amount of detail when compared to the 120 FPS 4K 10-bit video on an M3). I then took a sequence and slowed it down by factor 5! Given the original 23.976 FPS this means only 4.795 Frames can be used to produce 1 second of video. But here is where post processing compute power can make the necessary difference. I used Davinci Resolve Studio 17.4 with its neural net "Speed Warp" motion estimation processing capability to render that slow motion. Watch here:

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The quality of motion estimation is truly astonishing. Of course it took quite a bit of processing (3 minutes for this 14 second clip of HDR10 video), but that is not really so important in post. Of course, if I shot this video at 30 FPS, the result would be even better in particular as the video would play at 30 FPS as well.

For one, these extreme high bitrates offered under severe processing and storage limitations only offer limited usefulness in my opinion. With the A2S at 4K 10-bit video, I don't exceed 29.97 FPS.