First flight of our MA, video question.

[emporer]

Hi all, new to all of this, I bought a Mavic Air last week after eying up drones for the last few years and finally took the plunge, never flown before and took it out yesterday for a spin and start learning the controls etc, all went well and I got about 45 mins fly time in, recorded some video etc.

Now, my question is this, primarily I want to record 4k 30fps, the bitrate is set and can't be changed as far as I can tell, but what I want to do i'm hoping is simple, I have about 6 clips from yesterdays flight, all I want to do is join them up to make one large file to store on my NAS and play, it appears the recording of video on the drone cuts the files at 4 mins 50 secs, so if I want continuous playback they need merging/joining. Is there a way to do this easily? I don't want to encode and want to keep the video intact with no rendering etc, just plain joining of the files.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Aerial-Pixel]

I use Davinci Resolve, if you setup the project similar to the original video the encoding is really quick. On my machine it's almost real-time. I usually want to edit in some way anyway.

 

[emporer]

Thanks, i'll have a look at that.

 

[paul1664]

If you're on Mac check out the free iMovie (on the App Store). I needed exactly the same thing yesterday and it worked a treat. Added some titles and a fade-in/fade-out just to round it out.

 

[Simmo]

The reason the files cut like that is due to the Fat32 SD card filing system, its not really a time thing, more of a 4 gig file size thing. There should be no problem just 'butting' them up in your editor.

 

[emporer]

Yep probably the 4g limit, although does it not use exFAT file system?

Had a quick go with Davinci, couldn't find any way to just join together which is a pain, had a quick render of 2 files off the card and it joined ok obviously but am getting a bit of stutter on playback, I used MP4 H.264 at native rez and framerate, set the max bitrate for 100mbps but looking at the stats upon playback and its showing the bitrate averaging over 200mbps.

Any recommended settings would be most appreciated, all I really want to do is retain as close quality to the original files but have them joined into 1 file for playback.

 

[emporer]

Ok, I may have something that works for me, I tried rendering with the Quicktime wrapper instead of MP4, still using H.264, set max bitrate at 100mbps and profile level as high, all seemed to work very well indeed, none of the stutter previously and easy enough to stream from my NAS to various media players around the house.

 

[Fmoots]

If you reformat your SD card to exFAT or NTFS the files shouldn't be split this way and videos will just save as one long video clip

 

[Simmo]

the SD card is formatted with the DJI GO app, the SD card that is less than or equal to 32GB should be formatted in to the FAT32 file system while the SD card that is larger than 32GB should be formatted in to the exFAT file system.

 

[emporer]

I'll have a look closer at the card tomorrow evening when I get time, pretty sure it will be exFAT though, its a 64gb card that was put in the MA straight out of the packaging and formatted via the DJI Go app.

 

[emporer]

Had a look at my SD card and its definitely been formatted to exFAT, so in theory it should not need to split the files around 4gb, but it is doing so, any ideas?

 

[Mc39]

Mp4 Joiner is easy and joins the clips quickly.