There is also a significant difference in the software that interprets the information from those sensors. Much cleaner images from AGM at 256 vs the ATN 384’s and I don’t think it’s the sensor. It’s likely software related. ATN is known for releasing firmware upgrades that improves image quality so that’s my suspicion.
One of the things that's also apparent between the scopes is ATN has the ability to adjust both the sensitivity and the contrast of the image. I see so many people run the sensitivity jacked up to 5 and the contrast on high, and they end up with a horrible video as a result. I run my sensitivity at 2 and my contrast at low, and I get phenomenal results with my THoR 4 384.
Forgive me here, as I'm about to go full engineer for a bit!
One other big thing from the ATN which negatively affects the recorded video is their video encoding method. Most standard mpeg recording algorithms allow you to set the bit rate. With a constant bit rate, a one minute video at 100Kbit rate will make a larger file size than a one minute video with a 50Kbit rate.
But look at what you see from all of these various THoR 4 videos I have recorded with varying recording lengths.
I've highlighted two videos, one with a 5 second runtime, and one with a 28 second runtime, and they are both 20,480 KB in size! The 5 second file has a significantly better video quality than the 28 second file.
Now notice something else really weird. All of the video files are multiples of 20,480K! What this means is that ATN is using a very primitive variable bit rate video encoding algorithm. Maybe they do this because:
- The processor they use doesn't have hardware video encoding capability and they have to do it completely in software.
- The processor runs too slow to do true constant bit rate encoding or high quality variable bit rate encoding in software.
What I would like to have is the 28 second file just be around 5 times as large as the 5 second file, and have great quality. SD cards are cheap. No one cares if they filled up a 64GB video card on a hunt if the recorded footage was spectacular.
This is one of the main reasons the footage you see in the viewfinder doesn't even hold a candle to the recorded video footage! This makes ATN look really bad, when in fact, they quality equals the competition.
Ok, engineer hat off.
