Video files split

[Drone man flying]

I am wondering why the videos that I take are split into 2 or 3 different files. I usually hit the record button when I first take off and hit stop when I land. When I retrieve the video from the sd card it's usually split into 2 or 3 files. I have tried this in 1080p 60 fps ,30fps, and in 4k and it still splits them. Anyone have an idea why? The sd card is a Sandisk extreme 64GB U3 V30 A2. Not sure if that is the issue.

 

[steve_lyt]

its the fling system (fat 32) it can only handle files of upto 4gb

 

[Drone man flying]

Can the card be reformatted to another format, and the drone will be able to write to it with a single file?

 

[steve_lyt]

no the drone only supports fat 32 sd card format

 

[Ice_2k]

I’m using exFAT on my card, which does support larger files but the drone still splits them, I’m guessing they just decided to do it like this for simplicity

 

[stratum01]

I’m using exFAT on my card, which does support larger files but the drone still splits them, I’m guessing they just decided to do it like this for simplicity

i was just going to comment the same thing.

 

[Dave Maine]

On the newer DJI drones, these files can easily be joined in post, without loosing any frames. DJI could easily have fixed this problem in software, but has never seen fit to do so.

 

[Jordaneer]

On the newer DJI drones, these files can easily be joined in post, without loosing any frames. DJI could easily have fixed this problem in software, but has never seen fit to do so.

Fat32 is the most common file format and by far the most compatible and convienant, and even if you are talking doing a full 25 minutes of high bitrate recording, you are only talking about 5 sperate files numbered in order, that is pretty easy to put together in post

 

[Dave Maine]

IF DJI wanted to, they could use ExFAT, which is the current Windows standard for large file storage, and supports much longer files without the need to join them manually. It is only laziness on DJI's part that they haven't done it.

The Apple ecosystem did away with that problem at least 10 years ago. Quicktime(.mov, .MP4) on Macs has never had that limit.

 

[Jordaneer]

IF DJI wanted to, they could use ExFAT, which is the current Windows standard for large file storage, and supports much longer files without the need to join them manually. It is only laziness on DJI's part that they haven't done it.

The Apple ecosystem did away with that problem at least 10 years ago. Quicktime(.mov, .MP4) on Macs has never had that limit.

Exfat is for flash storage that is low power like an SD card, windows doesn't use exfat as the default file system, it uses NTFS which is why Macs have a hard time writing to an external hard drive that was formatted by a windows computer and windows computers also have the same with a hard drive from Mac machine. Exfat can overcome this, it's not really designed for hard drives though

While yes DJI could get around this by formatting everything in exfat, I think they would rather have safety and convenience of knowing that essentially anything can read an SD card that is formatted in fat32

 

[z28lt1]

We had a thread on this recently.
The Mavic Air 2 uses exFAT. The internal storage is exFAT and if you format a card in Air 2, it will be exFAT. However, it also allows you to use FAT32. By default, just about every small card (32GB or less) comes formatted on FAT32, so DJI does not make you reformat that card. Plus, older DJI drones were in FAT32, so they let you move cards between drones.

Is it possible that they could have programmed it to check the formatting of the card and use different file sizes for each? Maybe. There are some video codecs that still use the 4 gb limit, and we have no idea what DJI is using -- not to mention what all the devices they support use (since they allow you to edit in device). We know some Android video codecs limit to 4GB as well.

Finally, as we noted in the previous thread, GoPro does the exact same thing, this isn't unique to DJI and many people who create/edit videos are used to it.

 

[stevecn70]

Fat32 only supports files up to 4GB. Technical explanation: 32 means 32 bit. Each bit can have 2 values, 0 or 1. So you take 2^32 = 4,294,967,296‬

 

[JoeyThePilot56]

Excellent explanation why my videos were being split into different parts. Thank you !

 

[SabrToothSqrl]

Back in my day 1.44MB was all we ever needed

I take that back. It took about a dozen floppies to copy DOOM to the computer lab in highschool.