I've done a couple flights now where the last video I was shooting was corrupted on the SD card.  The video couldn't be read by other computers accessing the SD card directly.

However, next time I placed the card back in the drone and used it, the file was repaired.  This has happened twice.  This leads me to believe DJI is aware this can happen and the drone does some file integrity check and repair on the video files on the card.

What is the proper procedure for a quick battery swap while ensuring I'm not corrupting any cached video that is being written to the SD card?  I'm shooting a parade this evening, and I want to make sure I have minimum downtime while doing a battery swap, without risking damage to the video I just shot.

Also to clarify, these corrupted videos happened after powering down the drone properly. I didn't remove the card or battery while the drone was still on.  Which leads me to believe powering down the drone while video is still being written to SD can corrupt the file.

Did you try to read the file directly from the drone with an USB cable? If not, try that.

I found that I had the last video clip corrupted if I didn't stop recording before powering down. Restarting the controller and powering up the drone again seemed to repair corrupted files.
So, make sure you stop recording before powering down and changing batteries. (Quite easy to forget sometimes).

Really lazy programming from DJI. If the software gets a Power Down signal, it can easily first do a cleanup and safely close down any remaining user procedures.

The video is probably all there 100% correct, but the MP4 video format  is not complete until the MOOV atom is written at the end. The same happens when downloading a video on the internet, if the last chunk is missing the file is not playable, but this can be repaired by guessing the structure of the file, video format, bitrate, etc.

yogi053 Posted at 12-4 07:28
I found that I had the last video clip corrupted if I didn't stop recording before powering down. Restarting the controller and powering up the drone again seemed to repair corrupted files.
So, make sure you stop recording before powering down and changing batteries. (Quite easy to forget sometimes).

  Yes, definitely easy to forget, and that may have been what I did. The other day I did a flight along the entire length of a lake, turned around to set up another shot for the return trip and forgot I hadn't stopped the previous video. So instead of starting the recording (and it was the better pass of the two) I ended up stopping it. Didn't discover that until I was watching the footage later.

Turbo1ed Posted at 12-4 08:58
The video is probably all there 100% correct, but the MP4 video format  is not complete until the MOOV atom is written at the end. The same happens when downloading a video on the internet, if the last chunk is missing the file is not playable, but this can be repaired by guessing the structure of the file, video format, bitrate, etc.

Yes this is what I believe happened, and DJI does some kind of housekeeping or integrity checks to fix these issues automatically on power-up.

daneast Posted at 12-4 09:25
Yes this is what I believe happened, and DJI does some kind of housekeeping or integrity checks to fix these issues automatically on power-up.

No way! The "housekeeping" should be done BEFORE the corruption occurs, not AFTER!

Perhaps ya didnt forget to turn it off drone but did you forget to stop recording? I have done this a few times

One other thing you could try is to, of course, make sure you stop recording. Then after recording has stopped, wait about a solid 30 seconds until you power off the Drone just to be safe. Test that out and see if it makes any of the corruption that you saw happening go away.

You may need a faster card?!  I use the Samsung Evo Plus and these integrals and have no issues that you're seeing