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Shot a video, but can't find it.

MavicFlyer

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On Sunday, I flew my Mavic Air, taking a video (4k) for the first half of the flight, followed by a couple of panoramas. All seemed normal - as the recording was running, I could see the elapsed time counting on the Go4 display, so I assumed it was recording.

I had some videos on that SD card that were shot earlier in June, in addition to the 06/21/2020 videos. I did my usual copy of the entire SD card to a folder on my PC for storage, and all seemed OK.

Yesterday, I got around to looking at the videos, all were there EXCEPT for the ones from 06/21/2020! I thought maybe somehow they got recorded to the internal storage on the MA, but that was not the case.

I scanned the SD card and internal storage with Rescuva undelete program, and there WERE deleted files on the SD card with sizes that I was expecting, and the prognosis for recovery were Excellent. I restored them all to a folder on my PC (nothing was written to the SD card since the flight on 06/21/2020).

Unfortunately, none of those files were playable, except for a small jpg thumbnail.

Has anyone encountered a situation like this? I looked at the flight record file with CSView, the camera data groups, and confirmed that recording was going on for the first half of the flight, followed by the panorama series. It would seem that the video file was correctly closed, since the recording was terminated normally, as opposed to letting the recording stop on its own when the drone shuts down.

It looks like my only hope for these videos is to work with Rescuva tech support to see what they suggest. Does anybody know of a better undelete program for Win10?
 
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Is it possible you switched the drone off BEFORE you stopped the recording?
If so try putting the card back in the drone and switching the drone on.
I don't think it will now work because the drone has been powered up since the you removed the card but on the off chance that it might.......
I find that if I have switched the drone off before stopping the recording the corresponding video will often not play on my PC, putting the card back in the drone and switching the drone on frequently seems to repair the video, which can then be played etc. etc. The above said, in my case, the damaged or incomplete video is always present on the card but we have differing models of drone so maybe yours does things slightly differently from mine
 
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Is it possible you switched the drone off BEFORE you stopped the recording?
If so try putting the card back in the drone and switching the drone on.
I don't think it will now work because the drone has been powered up since the you removed the card but on the off chance that it might.......
I find that if I have switched the drone off before stopping the recording the corresponding video will often not play on my PC, putting the card back in the drone and switching the drone on frequently seems to repair the video, which can then be played etc. etc. The above said, in my case, the damaged or incomplete video is always present on the card but we have differing models of drone so maybe yours does things slightly differently from mine
Thanks for the idea, but that didn't happen. I'm sure because I did a couple of panorama shots later in the flight, and it would have been impossible to do without stopping the video recording first.

I do a screen recording on my iPhone 8 from before I launch, until after I shut down, so I can review everything that happened during the flight.
 
I've tried several freeware/shareware/crippleware data recovery programs, and they either don't work, or want you to buy an "advanced or pro" version. Some have max file size, but they are all under the size of the MP4 files( 2 to 3 GB files).
Can anybody recommend such a program from personal experience with SD card video recovery? I don't mind paying. but I DO MIND downloading and instaling something that doesn't work.and then retuti
 
Some more info .

Notice in the _DownloadCache_ folder, there are two very large files. They appear to be the correct size, and the date.time stamp has the date I took the video. They would be MP4 4K files (actually they seem to be copies..there was only one video taken).
Does anyone understand how the the process that saves the videos works? Is this a temporary file? Is there a way to determine what the filename would have been - i.e. what number would have been added?1593185632093.png
 
Those .7z files are compressed files. I don't know how the DJI drones handle their video, but you could try copying those files and changing the extension to.mp4 and see if they'll run. Failing that get 7-Zip and see if the files will uncompress.

I'm out of ideas now, sorry.
 
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