Guide
Your DJI drone video won't open
Battery gone, emergency landing, a crash: the file is there but no player will open it.
Try this first — it's free
Put the microSD back in the drone (or in the camera, if you record on an Osmo) and power it up with the card inside. Wait at least half a minute without touching anything: on several DJI models the device re-checks the files on the card at startup and closes the half-written one by itself.
If the drone went into water or won't power up at all, skip this step: only the card matters now, and it should be taken out and set aside.
Why it happens to drones in particular
The drone writes video to the card while flying and closes the file — that is, writes the frame index — only when you stop recording. An emergency landing, a battery knocked loose on impact or a forced shutdown interrupt the writing at exactly that point: the pictures are already on the card, the structure holding them together isn't.
The card often also holds a smaller file with the same name, the low-resolution one the drone uses for preview. Don't throw it away: it isn't your footage at full quality, but it confirms the recording really happened and is useful as a reference.
First things first: is your file recoverable?
The check takes two seconds, it's free, and the video is never uploaded anywhere: the analysis runs inside your browser, on your own computer.
See if it's recoverableWhat not to do, under any circumstances
- Don't reformat the card just to get the drone flying again: use a different one.
- Don't fly again with that card inside.
- Don't let the drone app delete the files it flags as damaged.
- Don't copy the file back and forth between devices: every interrupted copy adds damage.
If the drone didn't close it by itself
The index is rebuilt starting from a healthy flight: a second video shot on the same drone, at the same resolution and frame rate. A three-second take-off in the garden today will do, as long as the settings match.
The video comes back at its original quality, with no re-encoding. On recent drone files the audio is recovered too, when the recording had any.
Questions I get every time
The drone went into water. Will the card survive?
Usually yes: microSD cards survive immersion far better than the electronics around them. Dry it thoroughly before putting it into a reader, and don't try to power up a wet drone.
I see two files for the same flight, a big one and a small one.
The small one is the low-resolution version the drone keeps for preview. Send both: the small one is sometimes playable and helps work out what the big one should contain.
There's nothing left on the card after the flight.
Then the problem isn't the file but the allocation: the card lost track of where the data was. It's recovered with software that hunts for the blocks directly on the card, and it has to be done before anything is written over them.
If you'd rather I handled it
You send me the file and the reference video, I send you a preview of the recovered one, and only then do you decide whether to pay. Twenty euros per video, thirty-five for up to five files from the same device.
You only pay if the video turns up.