Ok, what the heck did i do wrong. I went out to film a bridge crossing creek here in Arizona and came home and nothing but a black screen.
Shutter speed 120, FPS 60, MP4 format. everything looked great on the tablet as i am flying around. there are five clips, each about 3 gigs in size and nothing but black. Please don't tell me my brand new P4P camera is bad. Any ideas?

Post the shortest clip to Dropbox so we can see it. If you saw an image on your screen while flying, then how can the camera be bad?

Is this happening to video recorded on the drones micro sd card, then transferred to your computer?
Maybe a bad micro sd card?

RedHotPoker

RedHotPoker Posted at 2016-12-17 14:54
Is this happening to video recorded on the drones micro sc card, then transferred to your computer?
Maybe a bad micro sd card?

I think You're right. It will play on Quick Times but not Windows Media Player. However on Quick Times it is very jerky. I don't think the card can handle the 4k. This is the first time i have tried to shoot in 4K. Other times i shot at 1080 simply because i didn't have a monitor that could handle the high res. Otherwise i might have discovered this earlier. I think i'll switch cards and do some testing. Bummer about the wasted trip though.

Rapfife Posted at 2016-12-17 16:02
I think You're right. It will play on Quick Times but not Windows Media Player. However on Quick Times it is very jerky. I don't think the card can handle the 4k. This is the first time i have tried to shoot in 4K. Other times i shot at 1080 simply because i didn't have a monitor that could handle the high res. Otherwise i might have discovered this earlier. I think i'll switch cards and do some testing. Bummer about the wasted trip though.

For one you shouldn't try playing 4k directly from the card, transfer it to your computer first. The other thing though, your computer might not be capable of playing back 4k natively so the footage will be choppy.

Having a set of different sized card readers built into my hp Phoenix Envy tower is great.
Easy to insert the micro sd card into an adapter, to download all the 4K video from a previous day of flying, and view them on the widescreen monitor...

Once the videos are in the computer I will format the 64gb micro sd card, back in the gimbal of the Phantom.

RedHotPoker

Rapfife Posted at 2016-12-18 09:02
I think You're right. It will play on Quick Times but not Windows Media Player. However on Quick Times it is very jerky. I don't think the card can handle the 4k. This is the first time i have tried to shoot in 4K. Other times i shot at 1080 simply because i didn't have a monitor that could handle the high res. Otherwise i might have discovered this earlier. I think i'll switch cards and do some testing. Bummer about the wasted trip though.

You do not have a problem with the card. As Trance728 says, don't try to play back from the card itself, copy it to a hard drive and play it from there. And just because your computer can handle 1080p, it does not mean it is fast enough for 4K, in fact, the majority of computers cannot handle 4k. When they try, what see see a a choppy playback, just like you are experiencing.

Yes, that truly is the best way and most efficient.

Copying the 4K video files from micro sd card to desktop hard drive, doesn't take all that long at all either.

RedHotPoker

Geebax Posted at 2016-12-17 16:29
You do not have a problem with the card. As Trance728 says, don't try to play back from the card itself, copy it to a hard drive and play it from there. And just because your computer can handle 1080p, it does not mean it is fast enough for 4K, in fact, the majority of computers cannot handle 4k. When they try, what see see a a choppy playback, just like you are experiencing.

So what is the solution? this is a pretty good computer. Should i convert the 4K into a lower resolution? is there a better video player than Windows Media Player that would handle it? Thanks for the input so far.

Now that i think about it, i downloaded the videos to an external hard drive because my hard drive is running out of room. That is probably not much better than running from the SD card. I'll move it to he hard drive and see what happens.

Rapfife Posted at 2016-12-18 11:52
So what is the solution? this is a pretty good computer. Should i convert the 4K into a lower resolution? is there a better video player than Windows Media Player that would handle it? Thanks for the input so far.

The VLC Player is a free download and works very will, but if the computer is not fast enough it will not be able to run a decent editing program. It is not so much the speed of the computer or the available RAM, it is about how many cores the processor has and whether you have a decent video card and GPU or not.

Geebax Posted at 2016-12-17 18:10
The VLC Player is a free download and works very will, but if the computer is not fast enough it will not be able to run a decent editing program. It is not so much the speed of the computer or the available RAM, it is about how many cores the processor has and whether you have a decent video card and GPU or not.

So I downloaded the VLC player, still is jerky but it lets you play it back slower, then it works good.
Gotta be the computer but i never would have guessed it. This PC is setup for CADD. I am a custom home designer and run Revit and Autocad all day long. It is an I7 with 6 cores, 64 gigs of ram, has a Nvidia Quadro K4200 with 4 gigs on board. Not a gaming card but a good one none the less. I sure would have thought before today it could handle 4K. So for now i am converting the 4K back to 1920x1080. Might have to look at a gaming card.

Rapfife Posted at 2016-12-18 14:23
So I downloaded the VLC player, still is jerky but it lets you play it back slower, then it works good.
Gotta be the computer but i never would have guessed it. This PC is setup for CADD. I am a custom home designer and run Revit and Autocad all day long. It is an I7 with 6 cores, 64 gigs of ram, has a Nvidia Quadro K4200 with 4 gigs on board. Not a gaming card but a good one none the less. I sure would have thought before today it could handle 4K. So for now i am converting the 4K back to 1920x1080. Might have to look at a gaming card.

Try the Free version of DaVinci Resolve, best way to downscale and do colour correction at the same time. And it will make use of your GPU, whereas most programs do not.