Mavic 3 vs 3 Cine - ProRes? Flymore? Worth it?

[cgmaxed]

I had the same question about the value of the Fly-More package. The additional batteries, charger hub, filters, and propellers for $900USD don't add up! In fact, you are paying more than to cost of the individual items at retail. This is DJI math. I have long been unimpressed with DJI's customer service policies and practices. This takes the cake. They don't care they are doing it in our faces.

I bought the basic version of the M3 and then purchased 1 extra battery and a charging hub. It saved me a few hundred bucks, which I put toward DJI care refresh. The Fly more combo is convenient, but over priced. I think it's because of the extra lenses and that 300 dollar carrying case. I definitely don't need another case to carry a drone. I have plenty inexpensive cases made for camping. I find them much more flexible when packing my equipment compared to a specialized case.

 

[cgmaxed]

I have both versions, Cine and regular. I can say that even pixel peeping I can't see any image quality difference between Prores and H265. Bizarrely, I find I can push the H265 files more in post than the Prores files. The only advantage I can see in using Prores is how responsive they are in the timeline being relatively uncompressed. If you are sharing your footage/edits with others who will also edit the footage then the iterative loss of quality is much less with Prores than with H265. But if you are the only person editing your footage then Prores doesn't offer anything meaningful that I can see. In fact, when you consider the file sizes and the irritating necessity to have to plug your drone into your PC and power it on to download footage I'm mostly just shooting to microSD in the Cine. I'm going to do more testing with motion as this is an area where Prores might show a qualitative difference compared to H265.

Too bad they couldn't have made the drone power on (at least for transferring video) with just the USB3 cable attached.

 

[christangey]

ProRes HQ is a big plus for editing high resolution video, like the 5.7k video the drone can produce. That resolution in either H.264, or H.265 will demand a very modern high powered PC to play the video without stutters and compression artifacts.

On the other hand, there are few uses for such large videos in the consumer world.

In the commercial world, when you are shooting drone footage to be combined with high end movie camera footage in making a film for Amazon or Netflix etc, it is very useful.

But you know what? I reckon I could shoot material in H265 HLG and transfer it straight over to color-graded Prores HQ for delivery and Amazon and Netflix would never know the difference.

 

[Akbuk]

AppleProRes with Dlog is absolutely unusable with Mavic 3 Cine. I am very disappointed. The poor quality of the codec can be seen in the attached video with a detailed description.
The link to download the original files without editing is in the description of the YouTube video.

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