New Mavic Air 3 SD Card Wiped After Using LightCut

[SSR]

Yesterday I flew my new Mavic Air 3 for the first time (I am an experienced pilot who had previously flown both a Mavic Air 2, Mavic Air, and Spark for many years), and it was great. I had the same SD card I’ve been using with the other drones, and had no issues with the video or saving, the card was empty prior to flight, etc. However, when I returned home, I decided to give the new LightCut app (the officially recommended DJI editing app) a shot. So I connected the app to the drone and made a little video with the footage from the drone. I saved it and all was good. Then I pugged in the SD card to my computer, only to find that there were no files on it, as if they had been erased.

Has anyone else had any similar experiences? I know its a new app, but deleting your SD card footage without asking seems like a pretty bad feature. Any ideas?

 

[SmilingOgre]

Nope, I'm a Davini Resolve snob, lol.

 

[sbunting]

I’d check to see if the video was stored on the RC or on the mobile with the app, depending of course on how you are configurEd.

 

[Julie_Jules]

with the statement above, it may be stored on the local drive vs the SD card. When you put the SD card into that drone it actually asks you if you want to switch the storage.

 

[Felix le Chat]

Yesterday I flew my new Mavic Air 3 for the first time (I am an experienced pilot who had previously flown both a Mavic Air 2, Mavic Air, and Spark for many years), and it was great. I had the same SD card I’ve been using with the other drones, and had no issues with the video or saving, the card was empty prior to flight, etc. However, when I returned home, I decided to give the new LightCut app (the officially recommended DJI editing app) a shot. So I connected the app to the drone and made a little video with the footage from the drone. I saved it and all was good. Then I pugged in the SD card to my computer, only to find that there were no files on it, as if they had been erased.

Has anyone else had any similar experiences? I know its a new app, but deleting your SD card footage without asking seems like a pretty bad feature. Any ideas?

Check the video clip to identify what it's encoded in: H264 or H265. If you have a Windows PC, most still don't recognise H265 - you have to download and install the missing codec.

 

[DARKSeifer]

The video was probably saved on the 8GB of the Air 3 internal memory, just connect the drone to the computer with the USB cable.

If that's not the case, use Recuva (free and usually the best)/Rescue pro/Ease us data recovery to recover the delated files from the SD card.

Cards that die usually die for writing, but can still be used to read the files.

In any case, to prevent data loss in the future, have the files copied in at least two different storages, So don't start editing till you copied the files on your computer.

I always buy my external drives in pairs, 5TB 2.5" disks seems to be sweet spot these days.