Bruce M
Active Member
Yes and no to deliberate downgrading.
There are certainly militaries like the US that downgrade official picture releases to mask their overall capabilities, but some of it may not be so deliberate. Covering up sensitive information(usually times and lat/long) requires it to be edited, and the editing program may output a lesser quality image.
The image quality seen by the operator is the full video quality, but the recording equipment cant record at that level - uncompressed video is rediculously large. So the recorder type and bitrate setting will be a big hit on quality. Same for downlinks, a lot of loss there.
I'll also add upload losses - youtube and social media also dithers incoming videos to compress them, yet more reduction on the original quality.
Recent-ish conflicts (<5 years) has seen the rise of a lot more footage making it out into the public. The Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2021 was the first where there was really unrestricted uploading of combat footage - lots of Bayraktar TB2s blowing up everything. The previous war on terror conflicts were mainly controlled by US, so their footage didnt get pushed out at the same rate. Early Ukraine has good TB2 footage as well - enough to inspire songs and donation campaigns.
For smaller systems, check out American law enforcement videos. There are many high quality MX10 videos of car chases and takedowns.
The other phenomenon that I hate is getting past video download restrictions by pointing a cell phone at a monitor and recording the footage that way. Bad for all the obvious reasons. But this is how videos get 'leaked', and are unfortunately common.
So its a mixed bag. There is a lot of small to mid sized camera system footage becoming publically available, so you can get a feel for what they are capable of. The larger systems cost well over $1m for just the optics systems, and then you need an air vehicle big enough to carry it, so that footage doesnt get out as much because only high-end customers own and operate them, and they are less likely to publish for likes and clout.
A dedicated publicity and promotion video can be good quality, but an expected 'ufo' encounter has a lot of reasons why the resulting footage is poor.
