Copy Footage from X5R SSD without Transcode?

[jmlfilm]

Hello gentle gurus of the Inspire Pilots forum!

I've been testing footage with the Inspire 1 and X5R for a couple of weeks trying to get up to speed with the characteristics of the camera from a photographic standpoint, and while I must say that it captures some of the nicest images of any camera I've ever owned, the clunky system of having to run the Raw footage through CineLight and transcode it off the original SSD card without being able to copy the original file off the card and into a post production environment makes this camera almost professionally untenable.

I've been researching this for hours and it seems that DJI has not come up with any better way to clear and backup these cards than transcode it first, so I'm posting this as a last ditch effort to find out if anyone has found any kind of technical system to get these files off the cards and onto a hard drive not only to back them up, but clear the cards for re-use on set.

I'm currently running a 2.5ghz 2015 MacBook Pro, which is my every day machine, and in order to get the footage onto a hard drive I'm averaging about ONE HOUR of rendering time for ONE MINUTE of footage. So if I have an eight minute take, it's taking me eight hours to just get it off the card. This ratio does not change regardless of which format I'm transcoding to.

If I shoot all day on this camera, and fill four (extremely expensive) cards with aerial footage, I can't tell the production company I'll get them their footage in four days once it finishes transcoding - I'd never get hired again.

Has anyone figured out how to deal with this in any method other than having to buy a brand new computer and super fast SSD drives so the processing time is faster? Any way to just move the raw data on to a hard drive in a way that I can deal with later and not on set?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and rewarded with generous compliments! Otherwise I'm sad to say I might have to reconsider this rig as a professional tool, which would be a major bummer!

Thank you!!
Josh

 

[InterMurph]

The raw footage is on the card. You should not have to transcode it to get it off.

When I used my X5R, I got the footage off with a Windows program called DJI Camera Exporter. It did not transcode; it simply copied the individual CinemaDNG files to a target directory on my computer.

The Mac software should offer the equivalent.

I documented my experience in this thread, which might be of some help: I've just about had it; X5R Camera Exporter Failures!

 

[InterMurph]

And according to the last post in this thread (https://forum.dji.com/thread-104501-1-1.html):

rom the manual, pg 5

You can export a DNG sequence, TIFF sequence, or various levels of ProRes from proxy to 4444XQ.

AFAIK, the DNG sequence seems to be and unencrypted version of the RAW recording on the SSD
​

The "DNG sequence" is what you want, as that is the original format of the raw footage; a series of DNG files. If you export to a DNG sequence, you should have the original raw footage, and it should go faster than you are experiencing.

If it is still incredibly slow, then you might want to investigate whether the connection between your computer and the SSD reader is operating at USB 3.0 speeds or not.

 

[jmlfilm]

Thank you so much oh wise responder! This has indeed solved my issues. I'd read all the literature, and scoured all the forums before posting, and I'd tried all brands of export via Cinelight EXCEPT the first one - RAW DNG. I had tried the one labeled For Premiere - but in that case it seems to be converting them to something else (I'm not sure why), so I assumed the same would be true for the other - but it's not at all. I'm now offloading shots in better than real time, and high on life thanks to your input.

I'm not sure why this aspect is so cryptic, either that or its so simple that my brain decided to overthink it, but either way I was able to successfully offload a shot in RAW, load it into Premiere, and create a proxy that runs smoothly on my machine, no problemo.

You are the awesomest!! Thank you!!

(BTW InterMurph, Mac users have different software, the Windows version seems much more straight forward, but the Mac version seems to have some handy features if you choose to use them)

 

[InterMurph]

The Windows version is more straightforward because it does only one thing: copy the Cinema DNG files from the encrypted/protected SSD to your computer. In general, it is not possible to get ProRes encoding software on the Windows platform, so it doesn't do any of that.

Glad you are all set now!

 

[lil_chirp]

The Windows version is more straightforward because it does only one thing: copy the Cinema DNG files from the encrypted/protected SSD to your computer. In general, it is not possible to get ProRes encoding software on the Windows platform, so it doesn't do any of that.

Glad you are all set now!

problem with that is you can't preview or see which files ur copying