DJI Phantom 4 PRO!!!

I got the Mavic Pro.

After looking through a lot of videos online, and playing with it myself, I can confirm it's exact same ballpark as ~P4 for quality like some others have said. If like me you were discouraged by some online videos, it appears there are many people leaving sharpness all the way up, doing wonky things with their frame rate and exports and compression settings, or just not handling the camera or drone well at all.

Also I disagree that the P4 Pro and Mavic Pro have no portability differences as one poster said. I can see where they are coming from, but context is everything. The Mavic is insane in terms of filling up one compartment of my thinktank bag, instead of needing a case. This is huge for international travel or hiking to locations, or moving locations by motorcycle, etc. It's very compact and in hindsight, I am glad I went for the Mavic and not the P4Pro. I can wait for the Mavic Pro 2 for the next big quality jump.
 
Excellent. Like I said before, the best camera is the one you have with you. If the Mavic is with you more often, it's going to get shots that a drone at home in the case won't.

I miss mine a bit... I'll probably eventually end up with another one.
 
I already have a P4 and just ordered a Mavic today. I travel constantly and the ability to reduce my load by one bag (my P4 currently travels in a large hardshell case), especially in the case of international shoots, will be a godsend.
 
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Since I got my P4P I would never go back to a drone with less image quality. To me the P4P is finally good enough and I'll take that over Mavics smaller footprint. At the end if I'm not satisfied with the footage I can get out of a drone it doesn't matter how portable it is.
 
I can understand that Osslund! I really wanted the P4Pro for that exact same reason. I still want the IQ from the P4Pro.

But, after experiencing the Mavic Portability and realizing some of my projects would make the P4Pro footprint impossible for the travel and on foot treks with all my camera, sound, lighting gear + drone... it wasn't to be. I can report I am pleasantly surprised by the Mavic Pro and there are some stunning clips from it from people who know they're doing.

I will definitely get the Mavic Pro 2, probably within 16 months given DJI's track record, and I can't help but assume that by then it will have the P4Pro's IQ + maybe 100-200 mbps H.265 etc...
 
filmguy123 said:
I can report I am pleasantly surprised by the Mavic Pro and there are some stunning clips from it from people who know they're doing.
Click to expand...

Links would be appreciated. So far, I have not seen anything from the Mavic that looked breathtaking. A few that are decent but everything just seem a bit mushy from it.
 
You can get a policy from State Farm to cover it for non-professional use. For professional use, you'll need an aviation policy with hull coverage. Not sure the hull coverage is worth it for a $999 drone.

Care Refresh never seemed like a great deal to me.
 
filmguy123 said:
There's more, you can find lots of people posting on the Mavic forum itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91NEHJQRMHU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Y0L_dXl_I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFu0W6P2w6A
Click to expand...

Ths only one of these that impresses me is the last one over the beach, it looks pretty decent. The other two are okay but nothing special as far as picture quality although the snow one is spectacular as far as subject matter, but it looks oversharpened. 60Mbps is what it is, okay probably for 1080, way too low for 4K. 100Mbps is just going to look better. I am not buying a drone at the moment. Like many of you, I will probably wait for up graded camera Mavic pro or will buy the P4Pro.
 
Pure, yes, point is it shows what the camera is capable of in different hands. I agree the snow looks a bit sharpened, but what I hear all over is "the mavic looks too sharp" or "the mavic looks too muddy" or "xyz". Each of these 3 has a different look in different colors. The beach one does NOT look over sharpened.

I guess point is, these all look good to me (relatively speaking in sub $2000 drone world) and the look can be dialed. Wouldn't you say these look just as good as P3Pro or P4? Obviously they would never compete with an inspire or a drone carrying an arri alexa or something, but I don't think anyone expected that. Those samples look years better than a lot of the footage I was seeing that had me concerned.
 
One thing learning on the Mavic seems to be that you can't just set in Dlog and forget it. Dlog for high contrast where extra DR is needed. Cinelike or ART for lower contrast / normal scenes.

Also learning you cannot reduce sharpness when in Dlog because the bitrate gets distributed to more stops, and you lose data rate in the midtones. So, reducing sharpness in dlog creates a water colour affect as the tiny sensor can't resolve the details correctly.

Moral of the story is, it seems you can get decent quality out of the Mavic but it's definitely higher maintenance to massage settings on a case by case basis. The P4 Pro larger sensor + extra bitrate really helps.

You pay the price for portability, but if you're willing to wrestle with the settings a bit and know what you are doing and why, you can achieve good results on the Mavic. But it is not a "one setting to rule them all" camera by any means.
 
After so many years of shooting so many codecs, I think a lot of it has to do with the codec implementation and like you and others have stated, how the person shooting and doing post handles the image. Good example would be AVCHD. When the early AVCHD cameras came out, the implementation of the codec was really, really bad. Early AVCHD cameras had pictures that were rife with low contrast noise fields. mosquito noise and just general ugliness. FF a few years and the Canon C100 is probably the best implementation of that codec I have seen. Pretty amazing that when you compare AVCHD at 24Mbps out of the C100 with Prores HQ that has about eight to ten times the bit rate, in all but a few scenarios, they are visually indistinguishable to almost everyone. That is amazing to me, that means that Canon did a very good implementation of the AVCHD codec.

As far as the drones, i don't think the 60Mbps codec Mavic Pro looks inherently bad, but you have to be a lot more careful about how you expose the images and post process than you do with the 100Mbps implementation on the P4Pro. Those extra 40Mbps give you a bit more latitude in how carefully you have to expose and process the signal and if you do everything right on the 60Mbps and everything right on the 100Mbps, the 100 Mbps signal will always look noticeably smoother, more detailed without looking over-sharpened and will always have fewer compression artifacts. For many of us, that outweighs the convenience of small size and weight, yet for many of us, more convenient size and weight doesn't outweigh image quality. And of course, a larger imager will usually look better. I hope DJI will implements the camera/recorder from the P4Pro into the next iteration of the Mavic Pro, that would be the ultimate, but then we are also getting into DJI taking away there own sales for a more expensive model too so there are marketing concerns there as well. If I was buying a consumer drone today, it would still be the P4pro but size and weight are not a primary concern for me, I don't want to take a drone hiking or mountain biking or on a plane.
 
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To bring this thread back to life, I finally stumbled upon some stunning Mavic Pro shots, very nicely done, the guy obviously knows post as well.

 
puredrifting said:
To bring this thread back to life, I finally stumbled upon some stunning Mavic Pro shots, very nicely done, the guy obviously knows post as well.

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing.

I've seen so many drone shots it's hard to be impressed anymore. Props to that guy for using drone shots for a purpose instead of just throwing an unnecessary aerial in for the sake of it.
 
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