Length of footage

[Music One]

Filmed a flight yesterday and today with my new Mavic Air. Both footage are about 6 mins long. On both of them each one cut out very briefly around 4mins then continued. Only noticed this when I download into the computer. Instead of two files I have four. Is that right?

 

[Thomas B]

Yes. The drone has a limit of about 4 min for any single video. Not adjustable unfortunately.

 

[FoxhallGH]

Yes - you'll find that it's actually the file size that's the common factor here i.e. if you set the video resolution lower, you'd get a longer video segment before you reached the file size limit, which from memory, is about 4GB ... I believe this is something to do with the way that the SD card is formatted. If you combine the files in video editing software, you'll find that you don't see a break.

 

[Former Member]

Careful shooting will reduce file size and post processing time. Not many pro videographers let the camera roll when they arent shooting something they went to shoot. A few minutes in careful shooting will save hours in editing.

 

[Moose1967]

I have videod many of my full flights in 1080p and 4k and have never had this issue with my MP1 - I have a 64gb card - I have some videos up to 20 minutes long - only ever have one file for each of those flights and some are very big - must be how the card is formatted - will check the weekend and see how it is formatted.

 

[ROMEY]

I would like to know how it's formatted myself. I've tried exfat as well as fat32 and I'm still only able to get 12 mins per clip....approx 4gig be for it starts another

 

[Former Member]

I'm just wondering Why people choose to let their videos run so long? Do you guys edit your videos after shooting 15 or 20 minutes in one file? That's a heck of a lot of work to do, poring through all that foot it's just to get a few seconds worth

 

[Moose1967]

When I am doing photography work I only press record when the right time arises - I do a lot of land videos I usually start recording before I take off and stop it after i land - that way if anything happens I got it on my mobile device.

Like so:

 

[Thomas B]

When I am doing photography work I only press record when the right time arises - I do a lot of land videos I usually start recording before I take off and stop it after i land - that way if anything happens I got it on my mobile device.

Like so:

Is this your “off the grid” home?

 

[Hegemone]

What speed is your card. Slower cheaper cards require more buffer space when writing and if that buffer fills up the recording will stop. I had this issue using cheap slow cards in a camera before. I am sure I have the technical terms a little wonky but the gist is your card needs to be as fast at writing data as the machine is at bringing it in. Just a thought.

 

[johnmeyer]

4GB is the FAT32 limit. Period. No way around it.

If you want larger-sized files so you can have longer continuous videos, you need to format in some other format. eXfat will work, if the Mavic supports it. So will NTFS, with the same disclaimer.

BTW, I've done a lot of video work over the years, including several weddings where I shoot four cameras at a time. I am a big believer in "coverage," which is the term for just letting the camera crank, and then throwing away, in post, most of what you've shot. This, of course, fills up the card. So, since I never use memory cards for permanent storage, what I do when I'm finished shoot is that I put the h.264 MP4 onto the timeline in Vegas Pro. I cut out all the stuff I'm not going to use, and then send the EDL (Edit Decision List) to ffmpeg or VideoRedo, both of which can losslessly cut the MP4 files. I then only keep what I need, and eventually erase the original from the memory card. Alternatively, you can use the editor to cut out what you don't need, but in-camera editing is really cumbersome.

With this approach, you get the best of both worlds: you never miss anything while flying, and you can, with only 1-2 minutes of work, do a rough cut to remove all the stuff you'll never use, and then only save the good things.

For me, I find this much better than starting and stopping the video because, for one, I never have to remember to re-start the video (I've done this many, many times), and I always have a high-res record of anything that goes by that I might not have planned on, but want to keep.

 

[Former Member]

4GB is the FAT32 limit. Period. No way around it.

If you want larger-sized files so you can have longer continuous videos, you need to format in some other format. eXfat will work, if the Mavic supports it. So will NTFS, with the same disclaimer.

BTW, I've done a lot of video work over the years, including several weddings where I shoot four cameras at a time. I am a big believer in "coverage," which is the term for just letting the camera crank, and then throwing away, in post, most of what you've shot. This, of course, fills up the card. So, since I never use memory cards for permanent storage, what I do when I'm finished shoot is that I put the h.264 MP4 onto the timeline in Vegas Pro. I cut out all the stuff I'm not going to use, and then send the EDL (Edit Decision List) to ffmpeg or VideoRedo, both of which can losslessly cut the MP4 files. I then only keep what I need, and eventually erase the original from the memory card. Alternatively, you can use the editor to cut out what you don't need, but in-camera editing is really cumbersome.

With this approach, you get the best of both worlds: you never miss anything while flying, and you can, with only 1-2 minutes of work, do a rough cut to remove all the stuff you'll never use, and then only save the good things.

For me, I find this much better than starting and stopping the video because, for one, I never have to remember to re-start the video (I've done this many, many times), and I always have a high-res record of anything that goes by that I might not have planned on, but want to keep.

I can see this working if you are a pro, are very good at editing (which is the hardest part), and have a fast computer to edit with. I think for the amateur, he is better off shooting only what he needs. Otherwise, editing an hours worth of footage on a low horsepower computer can takes many hours.

 

[johnmeyer]

I can see this working if you are a pro, are very good at editing (which is the hardest part), and have a fast computer to edit with. I think for the amateur, he is better off shooting only what he needs. Otherwise, editing an hours worth of footage on a low horsepower computer can takes many hours.

I agree that, if you aren't comfortable with your NLE, don't do this. However, since I am talking about just dragging the timeline cursor until you get to the stuff you want, pressing the cut key, and then discarding the stuff you don't want, it really only takes 1-2 minutes, even for 30 minutes of footage. This is "run and gun" editing, with no attempt at precision. And, of course, there are no scene change that you have to precisely find.

It is really, really fast to do.

Then, since the footage is not being re-rendering but instead is a cuts-only "smart render" edit, the only time it takes to create the slimmed down version is the time for copying the footage. So, if you shot 32 GB of footage but are only going to keep 3 GB, it will take the same time to finish the edit as it does to copy any other 3 GB file.

 

[Former Member]

I agree that, if you aren't comfortable with your NLE, don't do this. However, since I am talking about just dragging the timeline cursor until you get to the stuff you want, pressing the cut key, and the discarding the stuff you don't want, it really only takes 1-2 minutes, even for 30 minutes of footage. This is "run and gun" editing, with no attempt at precision. And, of course, there are not scene change that you have to precisely find.

It is really, really fast to do.

Then, since the footage is not being re-rendering but instead is a cuts-only "smart render" edit, the only time it takes is the time for copying the footage. So, if you shot 32 GB of footage but are only going to keep 3 GB, it will take the same time to finish the edit as it does to copy any other 3 GB file.

Would you be able to give a quick runthrough of what you do from the time that the flight is finished, until the final product is complete? Ive always found editing to be cumbersome, and not a labor of love, like some people do.

I know you mentioned Vegas Pro as one of your steps in the process.

 

[johnmeyer]

Would you be able to give a quick runthrough of what you do from the time that the flight is finished, until the final product is complete? Ive always found editing to be cumbersome, and not a labor of love, like some people do.

I know you mentioned Vegas Pro as one of your steps in the process.

Here goes:

1. Remove card from drone. Insert card in computer reader. Copy all MP4 files for the flight to the computer.

2. Drag all files to the Vegas timeline (most other editors let you do the same thing).

3. Use any of the timeline playback or scrubbing tools to go rapidly through the footage. The easiest is to do what you can do in YouTube: just grab the playback "head" (the thing that shows what point in the video is being played) and drag it to scrub rapidly through the video. Doing this you can go through even a one hour video in five seconds. All you are doing is looking for, approximately, the start of each section of video you want to keep.

4. Use more precise playback controls to further adjust each cut point. It makes no sense to obsess about precision. If you are within ten seconds, that's probably close enough.

5. Cut the video at this point. In most NLEs, and certainly in Vegas, there are literally several dozen ways to create a cut, but the simplest in Vegas is to press the "S" key (for "Split"). The video to the left of the cursor is now a separate entity (Vegas calls them "events") from the video on the right.

6. Select the video to the left of the cut and, once selected, press the delete key to remove it.

7. Repeat steps 3-6 for the rest of the video until you have all the flotsam cut out.

8. Export the video timeline as a text-based "Edit Decision List" (EDL). This is simply a text file that has all the in/out points for the edit you just did. It is in CSV format and so can easily be imported into Excel or other apps, if you wish.

9. I wrote a small macro in Excel which opens this EDL and then feeds all the cut information to "ffmpeg" which is a batch cutting tool that can losslessly cut MP4 files, without and re-encoding or re-rendering. If your NLE supports "smart rendering" (i.e., the ability to do cuts-only edits without re-encoding the video) then you don't need to go through this extra step, and simply save the new, much shorter video. The output of this macro is a batch file. I just double-click on the batch file and the multiple calls to ffmpeg are executed and I am left with the cut version of my video in the same folder where I put the original, unedited video.

As I said previously, I can take a one hour video and cut out all the garbage in less than 30 seconds. Once ffmpeg has finished if the new files are only a few GB, it only takes about 20-30 seconds to save that file.

Currently I don't bother to recombine the cut files into a single file.

Later, when I am finished with the project and I archive and backup, I usually delete the original video from the memory card. For me, memory cards are a way to acquire the video and get it onto a computer but they are most definitely not a media on which I would ever archive something for long term storage. The technology used is not likely to reliably keep the data for long periods of time.

 

[Former Member]

Thank you for taking the time to post this. Im sure it took you a long time to get it all together.

You are the man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Former Member]

Here goes:

1. Remove card from drone. Insert card in computer reader. Copy all MP4 files for the flight to the computer.

2. Drag all files to the Vegas timeline (most other editors let you do the same thing).

3. Use any of the timeline playback or scrubbing tools to go rapidly through the footage. The easiest is to do what you can do in YouTube: just grab the playback "head" (the thing that shows what point in the video is being played) and drag it to scrub rapidly through the video. Doing this you can go through even a one hour video in five seconds. All you are doing is looking for, approximately, the start of each section of video you want to keep.

4. Use more precise playback controls to further adjust each cut point. It makes no sense to obsess about precision. If you are within ten seconds, that's probably close enough.

5. Cut the video at this point. In most NLEs, and certainly in Vegas, there are literally several dozen ways to create a cut, but the simplest in Vegas is to press the "S" key (for "Split"). The video to the left of the cursor is now a separate entity (Vegas calls them "events") from the video on the right.

6. Select the video to the left of the cut and, once selected, press the delete key to remove it.

7. Repeat steps 3-6 for the rest of the video until you have all the flotsam cut out.

8. Export the video timeline as a text-based "Edit Decision List" (EDL). This is simply a text file that has all the in/out points for the edit you just did. It is in CSV format and so can easily be imported into Excel or other apps, if you wish.

9. I wrote a small macro in Excel which opens this EDL and then feeds all the cut information to "ffmpeg" which is a batch cutting tool that can losslessly cut MP4 files, without and re-encoding or re-rendering. If your NLE supports "smart rendering" (i.e., the ability to do cuts-only edits without re-encoding the video) then you don't need to go through this extra step, and simply save the new, much shorter video. The output of this macro is a batch file. I just double-click on the batch file and the multiple calls to ffmpeg are executed and I am left with the cut version of my video in the same folder where I put the original, unedited video.

As I said previously, I can take a one hour video and cut out all the garbage in less than 30 seconds. Once ffmpeg has finished if the new files are only a few GB, it only takes about 20-30 seconds to save that file.

Currently I don't bother to recombine the cut files into a single file.

Later, when I am finished with the project and I archive and backup, I usually delete the original video from the memory card. For me, memory cards are a way to acquire the video and get it onto a computer but they are most definitely not a media on which I would ever archive something for long term storage. The technology used is not likely to reliably keep the data for long periods of time.

Do you prefer MP3 over mov?

 

[MAvic_South_Oz]

Careful shooting will reduce file size and post processing time. Not many pro videographers let the camera roll when they arent shooting something they went to shoot. A few minutes in careful shooting will save hours in editing.

I'm just wondering Why people choose to let their videos run so long? Do you guys edit your videos after shooting 15 or 20 minutes in one file? That's a heck of a lot of work to do, poring through all that foot it's just to get a few seconds worth

I usually just start a flight and film throughout, up to 15 mins usually, but sometimes 20 or even 25 mins (MP).
Sometimes you can catch things you might otherwise miss I guess.

Even so, I think I'll start doing more selective filming, allows to switch for a photo or two now and then as well.
Always good to read all these threads and take what you can from them.

 

[Former Member]

Always good to read all these threads and take what you can from them.

I agree. Even an old dog like me can learn something new every day (when Im not barking at or biting someone.)

 

[Moose1967]

Is this your “off the grid” home?

It's my hunting camp on 115 acres in beautiful Cape Breton Island, Canada