I have been testing our new Phantom 3 Pro the last week, and sofar been quite impressed. However, yesterday I had an incident that changed things quite a bit...

First problem was that I forgot to turn off recording after landing and powering off the drone. Searching the forum tells me that this has been an issue for a long time, also with older Phantoms. I can see that I did a mistake here, but come on! All functions are driven by software here, and I can not see any reason why the Power-off button cant deal with stopping the recording before cutting the power. This is something a "professional" tool should be able to deal with!

Second incident had the same outcome, but for a different reason. In mid air the drone reported that "SD Card was full". Fair enough, so I landed the drone and went home.

Once at home I plugged the SD card into my computers SD card reader, just to realize that there was NO recorded video!! Only the 3 clips from the previous day. The two I recorded was just not there. The memory card reported that it was indeed full, but only 7-8gb of data (from previous day) could be found. I did find the two THM-files, though. The first one (where I forgot to stop recording) was corrupt and the second one (full CF) was readable.

I've read through the forum for advices, and have tried inserting the card in the P3, powering back up and trying to read it again, but no luck.

Any ideas on how to recover the data? Ive seen the hints about the 3rd-party tool, "djifix.exe" but have not tried this yet...

And to DJI: Please deal with these issues! If this is to be used professionally, critical footage WILL get lost as these mistakes can happen easily and should be simple to fix.

Cheers,
Stian

It is good to know all this kind of things! thanks for sharing... I had my P2 with GoPro so that was not an issue...

Hope you recover the data.

I feel bad about your problems.
I've also turned off my Phantom before while it was recording. However, I've always been able to restore the video by following the advice in the manual and on the FAQ; to put back your microSD-card, turn on the Phantom, wait (30secs or more) - and it should restore the video that was not properly closed down. The way you can see what video was recovered is that the file has a wrong/"crazy" date. Besides that, it should work.

Good luck my fellow viking

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Buy your DJI-gear, batteries, cases by using this link - it'll help me out

Good news!! Managed to save both my videos, but it was a manual process.

First step was to use windows Scandisk tool on the CF-card, with "scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors" enabled. This took a while, but resulted in a folder with the two missing files, now named "FILE000.CHK". Tried renaming the files from CHK to MOV, and that actually worked fine for the second file (the one where CF was full). The first one, where I forgot to stop recording, was still unplayable. So I tried the "djifix.exe" tool on this one, which actually made the file playable again!! However, there was no settings for Phantom3 (or 4K @ 25fps) so I ended up with 4k @ 29.97fps, but that is fine. Hopefully next version of DJIFix will handle all P3-formats as well, which will be very useful until DJI manages to make a fix for this bug...

So there you go - don't give up your videos if DJI corrupts them. There is hope

Interesting.  I remember this issue being addressed in the FAQ:

My Phantom 3 does not turn off right away, is something wrong?
This is normal. After you attempt to power off the Intelligent Flight Battery, it may remain on for a few seconds as any video data is saved to the Micro SD card. This helps prevent your data from being lost or corrupted.

Interesting indeed... For sure did not happen here. Will do a few tests later to see if I can reproduce the problem.

Kongsvik Posted at 2015-5-19 07:53
Interesting indeed... For sure did not happen here. Will do a few tests later to see if I can reprod ...

We have to turn off the video before turning off the battery, glad I saw this before I lost a great shot.  Good post.

clkilljoy1@nets Posted at 2015-5-20 00:55
We have to turn off the video before turning off the battery, glad I saw this before I lost a grea ...

I must be living a charmed life.

Crashed my bird and the video was still available. Additionally, two or three times I've turned the P3P off without stopping the video recording. Haven't had a problem retrieving the video in any of these cases.

When my bird crashed, I was actually hoping to see in the video what kind of gyrations the bird went through. At the point where the Phantom went out of control, the video was terminated. But I still had the rest of the file up to that point.