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X5R-Reality Sinks in!

Joined
Jul 19, 2017
Messages
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Location
Milwaukee, WI, Ft Walton Beach, FL
Ok, took the bird out for a test flight today. After figuring out there has to be some bug in Litchi with the X5R. Tapping on the screen to record only records MP4. Using the controller record button (back corner) records both MP4 and the RAW.

Ran the test flight. Did fine. Seems the range isn't quite what I expected. Dropping signal strength to red at about 5k feet. Half what I get out of my P3P. But, I digress.

Ran nice long vid recording. 9m21s give or take.

I pop on the reader on my work machine. Install the software. And find out it works perfectly here. Unplug it. Ok. Plug it back in and the software picks it up right away. WTH? I have to screw with it over and over to get it to read at home. Win7 here. Win10 at home. Known issue with the SSd reader on Win10?

Anyway, not the reality I was referring to. Start the copy. And it fills up my SSD on the work machine and crashes. Stupid software. Delete that. Dump it to a 15k drive. Get it all copied and THAT is when reality of this sinks in.

16,835 individual files. 106 gig. For a 9m21 video. Woof. 11.3gig per minute average. Uhhhh. Wow. O_O
 
Shooting with raw is expensive. When I'm on set I'm trying to minimise the recording time as much as possible, that will make it easier to work with the footage later. Of course depending on what is shooting there could be different approaches. For film most of the shots we are shooting are around 10 sec long but the director says to all cameras to start recording about 30 seconds or minute before the action starts. I'm not listening to him and start the Rec after I see that the action will start shortly in any second. This way we can stay whole day on set with only 1 ssd drive (no junk footage). Later the editor is very happy because only 20% of the shot length is pure trash.
If you are going to shoot Timelapse then it makes sense to leave the rec for ever :)

I'm also on Win 10 and didn't had problems with the reader, don't have an idea of what it could be. Is there error message or some interaction from the comp when trying to connect the reader?
 
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That is a lot of data, have you started to edit it yet?
Nope. Just test footage at this point. Getting used to how the bird flies and handles. Only got a short flight at lunch. By quitting time, it was pouring down raining. So only one flight. Gotta get down to a camera store today at lunch and grab a ND8 or ND16. Had the SS up to 1/8000 with ISO 100 and the aperture tight at 16 which gave an average of -0.5ev. I like to shoot -1ev on the phantom due to the latitude spread on the sensor. Wanted to start there on the I1 and see what it looked like. Then will adjust +/- to see what this sensor best performs at. But with a mostly sunny sky at noon, those settings pretty much maxed in every point of the triangle Clearly a ND is going to be standard takeoff equipment on day shoots.

Shooting with raw is expensive. When I'm on set I'm trying to minimise the recording time as much as possible, that will make it easier to work with the footage later. Of course depending on what is shooting there could be different approaches. For film most of the shots we are shooting are around 10 sec long but the director says to all cameras to start recording about 30 seconds or minute before the action starts. I'm not listening to him and start the Rec after I see that the action will start shortly in any second. This way we can stay whole day on set with only 1 ssd drive (no junk footage). Later the editor is very happy because only 20% of the shot length is pure trash.
If you are going to shoot Timelapse then it makes sense to leave the rec for ever :)

I'm also on Win 10 and didn't had problems with the reader, don't have an idea of what it could be. Is there error message or some interaction from the comp when trying to connect the reader?

Clearly my old habit of rolling after takeoff and terminating the record before landing habit isn't gonna work with this bird. On the P3P, the MP4s are not that huge. So its not an issue to just roll it and slice it later.

As for the reader, no message, just it plain doesn't work. It gets out of sync I think. Like when I remove the drive from the reader, the software will pop up listing it. But I KNOW its not there because its in my hand. I plug it back in and now its not listed in the software anymore. Or more often than not, when I plug it in, I can see it in the windows drive list but the software has nothing in the dropdown selector at the top so no way to extract data. On my Win7 box here (using the DJI USB cable plugged into a USB extension plugged into a USB2 port worst case scenario) I could unplug it quickly, slowly, repeatedly, unplug the USB, plug it in with drive and without drive. No issue, always knew whether the drive is there or it isn't. But on Win10, its a freaking crap-shoot whether plugging it in each time will be in the proper sync. 80% or so of the time, its not in sync or doesn't recognize it. I tried it going through a hub, going straight into a front panel USB, on a USB extension, and using the USB3 cable from my Galaxy phone. Nothing made any difference. The one thing I did notice is that when I was in task manager killing the software, I noticed its 32bit. The machine is a 64bit box. Then again, so is my Win7 here, its 64 too. So I don't know.

I am sorry but this whole thing is f'ng moronic. There is NO need for this stupidity. I can't seen any reason why a FAT can't be written onto the drive to point to the dng files. Then a simple drag/drop would work on any device whether windows, apple, plugged into a NAS or SAS or one of those drive backpacks on the road. But I am sure the latter is why DJI consciously chose this idiotic path of hiding the data on the drive. So we have to buy more SSD drives from them with hybrid connectors and custom firmware rather than be able to dump the data easily and quickly on a portable unit on-site out in the field. And so we are stuck with idiotic software that can't even format the drive nor delete files from it after extracting them We have to use valuable battery power and time in the bird (gimbal) to format the SSD. AFAIK, we can't even delete ONE video from the SSD, Its either an all or nothing wipe.
 
I usually always first eject the usb media from the menu and then unplug the USB cable. Never used to unplug the ssd from the reader.
There is removal policy for every drive in windows, usually all USB drives are set to "quick removal" wich doesn't need to eject the drive but the drive work on lower speed. Mine is set to "better performance" so to read from it faster and when that is enabled sometimes the reader refuses to be ejected and then have to shutdown the comp to be sure that will not damage this expensive drive.
On Mac after plug in the reader the mac have to be restarted for the drive to appear, very frustrating.
 
Not sure where the failure is. But there is one. The drive is seen by windows. It shows up as a drive letter. It gets removed when the drive is removed from the carrier or if the carrier is removed from the usb cable. Plugging it back in restores it to the list. I can open the drive and see the drivers folders.

The problem is with either the DJI software or the driver behind it once installed. Even when the software is open and doesn't list the drive or its contents, I can see the drive in windows. So its not a mechanical connection issue.

I have an eSATA port and a 2 drive bay connected to it. I can quickly and easily drop in any SATA drive be it SSD or a spinner and read/write to it quickly and easily. I can't with this drive because DJI smurfed up the connector so its non-standard. They went out of their way to make it harder to use. And I have no doubts they did it out of greed to force us to used their over-priced SSD.

And yea, I checked, the driver/software on the drive is the current version as listed in DJI website.
 

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