DJI Phantom 3 Standard camera workable with Sony Vegas?

[John Rofrano]

[Angelo Mike] “I tried chatting with DJI’s online help but the person didn’t even know.”

This should be a clue that the company is staffed with incompetent people and you might not want to buy their products because you will get no support. After all, the main product is a video camera, How could they not know what format it shoots?

I checked the link in your post and there is no mention of video format. That tells me that they are not targeting video editors. What do they think the purpose of their device is for? It’s certainly not to fly around… it’s to take video. Yet no mention of the video format except 2.7K HD which I have no idea what that means because HD, 2K, and 4K and the industry standard formats, not 2.7K. So again, it seems the company is producing a nonstandard product.

Did you check the DJI Forums? I did, and I found lots of people complaining that they cannot edit the video and others recommending that they use a video converter to convert the footage. This sounds like a product that you will need to convert all of the video before you can edit it. Perhaps you should ask the question on the DJI forums but their customers seem to be just as clueless about video formats. One of them was saying that AVCHD was a Mac format! Really? lol

I did glean that it shoots MOV or MP4. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to go by. I would ask the company for a clip taken directly from the camera to see if you can work with it.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Thayalan Paramasawam]

I am also using phantom 3 but i change the camera to gopro hero 4 silver,if you use the orginal camera given by dji is not for filming.

Thayalan Paramsawam

http://www.jptsskyvision.com
System Details:
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[Steve Rhoden]

“tried chatting with DJI’s online help but the person didn’t even know”

Incompetent staff indeed. If a basic question as that cannot be answered and
the main purpose of this device is for video captures, then that tells a lot
about the company!
Still, ask them if they can provide you with a sample clip for testing, then
again, i know what their response is gonna be.

Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia

[Danny Hays]

From what I read on this thread, I would steer clear of that camera as well, but if you want to try and get some test footage from it, try searching Vimeo for that camera because of somebody uploaded a clip from a camera that has a Vimeo plus or higher account, you will be able to download the original uploaded clip. A free Vimeo account will do that for the first week but then not allow you to download the original clip but also down grade any 1080 video – 720.

Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos

[Matt Smitherz]

you can ask here

https://www.phantompilots.com/forums/phantom-3-discussion.81/

and here

https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2384430

Cameras should be the same as on p3 professional & inspire, only with a limited output.

And from DJI CEO’ interview and other news they are using same ambarella A9soc chip as gopro4.

“Ambarella’s fiscal first quarter results, released late Tuesday, make that number look attainable. The company, which makes the video encoding chips used in DJI drones as well as GoPro cameras ..”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ambarella-and-gopro-fly-high-on-drones-1433357377

https://forum.dji.com/thread-19599-1-1.html

https://www.ambarella.com/uploads/docs/A9%20Product%20Brief.pdf

+ I found this..
https://hdconverter.blogspot.it/2015/08/how-can-i-load-4k-video-from-dji-phantom-3-to-sony-vegas-pro.html

[Angelo Mike]

Curse you, DJI! I can’t get a straight answer and am still waiting on their tech support to respond to my email.

[Steve Rhoden]

Angelo, I wouldn’t bother!

Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia

[John Rofrano]

[Matt Smitherz] “And from DJI CEO’ interview and other news they are using same ambarella A9soc chip as gopro4.”

That means that they have the potential to capture the same quality as a GoPro but what matters is how they compress the footage after it’s captured. I’m guessing to keep the costs low they are using an encoder that isn’t very compatible with most NLE’s rather that licensing one of the better encoder. Or maybe that decision was driven by the processing power of the device?

It looks like if you purchase this camera you will need to re-encode all of the footage you shoot with it so as long as you are OK with that workflow, it’s a good deal. This seems to be a stigma with PC editors. If you were on a Mac, you wouldn’t think twice about this because the normal workflow is to take whatever horrible format your camera shoots and convert it to ProRes 422 on ingestion. Since this camera shoots MOV too, perhaps they were targeting Mac editors who wouldn’t even know that the camera footage was difficult to edit because they wouldn’t have even tried because they always convert to ProRes 422 on ingestion.

I wonder how well the native footage works with Final Cut Pro X? While Vegas editors where having trouble editing Go Pro footage, every time they posted a sample, I would load it into FCP X and it would edit beautifully. So maybe this camera is was tested with FCP X and it worked well. I’d love to get some raw footage and try it out so Angelo, if you find some, post back to this thread and I’ll be sure to load it into FCP X and see how it performs.

Bottom line: I would still worry that the support people could offer no video support. They are probably only trained to support flying the device but at the end of the day, what matters most is the video it shoots.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Danny Hays]

One option is to go to Vimeo and search for that camera. Is somebody with the non free account like Vimeo plus or higher they allow you to download the original footage for more than a week for many of free user account you can download it for a week and then after a week you can’t even download app nada everything is converted to 720 and the original footage is deleted. Good luck but personally I look for a different camera look into the Panasonic TM 700 I have a couple of them I love them absolutely.

Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos

[Danny Hays]

Did the camera fix the fish eye effect while it was recording and that’s the file you got from it? It looks like it was fish eye fixed with GoPro studio. It does the same as what I see in this video by stretching out the sides where things are wider on the left the right and when you pan you can see the things on the left and right are moving faster than in the middle. I found a fix for that in Vegas if you can get the video from the camera before it fixes the fish eye effect without that problem. Let me know if you’re interested on how to do that.

Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos