Air 2S Mission, NO pictures?

Greetings, yesterday I flew a standard mission with my Air2S, though last successful mission I was flying with the Mavic 2 Pro (no issues). The mission yesterday appeared to go well, had a brief return to home when we hit the flight time limiter, replaced the battery and wrapped up the last few pictures that it wanted. I believe it tried to upload the files, but gives me a message that DNG are not supported for app upload, no biggie as I grab files of the SD directly usually anyway.

To my dismay, got back, pulled the card, and there were only TWO pictures on the card, it looks like one at the first waypoint stop for the flight, but NOTHING else. Thinking it might have deleted them for some reason I did a full recovery scan operation on my SD card block by block, and while I found many gigabytes of files, none of them were from the shoot yesterday. I use a forensic software for my data recovery, and due to the nature of how SD card memory works, if the files had ever been there at all, there would have been evidence of them, but there was nothing. The puzzling thing is, looking at the flight log, I can see the picture points along the route, they even have a file name associated to each of them (see attached picture), but those files... are nowhere.

It looks like I will have to go back with my Mavic 2 Pro and do it ALL over again to be sure I get the data.

My question is, what could have happened here?? The SD card had space for the operation, the file system and partition were not corrupt and at DJI standards.

Any/all assistance on this greatly appreciated.

Richard Stanton April 30, 2022 21:05

Official comment

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. There is likely an issue with the setting of the flight speed when DNG is in use with the new Virtual Stick controls. Usually when DNG is selected we set the flight speed to 1 image per 10 seconds because that is what DJI specifies as being the max DNG frame rate. That might not be being done properly with the new manual controls system.

From the DJI documentation:

https://developer.dji.com/api-reference/ios-api/Components/Missions/DJIWaypoint.html#djiwaypoint_shootphotodistanceinterval_inline

"When the photo file format is RAW, the time interval between two photos cannot smaller than 10 seconds. If the input exceeds the camera's capability, the taken photos may be less than expectation."

So Map Pilot Pro was likely telling it to take images assuming it was going to be able to do it once every 2 seconds but the camera only supports readout at 10 second intervals. If this is in fact the issue we will likely have to slow the aircraft down significantly as we have done for other waypoint flights in order to collected the designated amount of overlap properly.

Zane April 30, 2022 21:39

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8 comments

Thank you @Zane, thank you for the quick response! I am pretty sure that I used DNG on my last mission too, with the Mavic 2 Pro, but it's possible I did have it set to JPG. I will go back and validate.

Your observations, however, seem to at least in part support the head scratching stuff I was seeing in the 2nd part of the flight. In that flight (a battery change and out to capture the last few spots that were left) I noticed a few red clusters of errors , not exactly where I expected them, and mostly together, but they do show up in the report. See the attached graphic view and a section of the data I downloaded to inspect. The odd thing is, though, I would have expected to see a LOT of these in the first flight, given that it was the by far the majority of the capture points. Could the shorter flight have allowed enough I/O breathing room to sneak out a few errors rather than just being overwhelmed by the data flow? I hope this helps you narrow things down. In the mean time do you believe that switching to JPG would give me a high probability of success? Or should I switch back to the Mavic 2 Pro and not risk it?

Some screen shots:

Richard Stanton April 30, 2022 22:56 0 votes

The M2P will work fine with DNG but it will fly much slower to accommodate the longer readout period.

Using JPG with the Air 2S should be fine. There are tons of flights per day using that.

Zane May 01, 2022 15:39 0 votes

Thanks for the info, will give the JPG a go then and do a hopefully quick recapture. Would MUCH rather be sending the Mavic 3 on the mission, though! Is there any word on DJI budging on waypoint API method exposure for the Mavic 3? I would have a hard time believing that they can possibly hold the Mavic 3 hostage like that when the Air2 S was allowed through.

And as a side question, if the team determines that the timing thing was the core issue, will there be a patch to the app to sync the Pro2 and the A2S behavior when RAW is in the mix? Or is there a flaw in the methods exposed by DJI which might be beyond your ability to correct?

Richard Stanton May 02, 2022 13:32 0 votes

It took over a year for the Air 2S to be added with just the virtual stick capabilities and DJI has said they will not be supporting the Mavic 3 for iOS (be sure to let them know that is upsetting).

This fix did not make it in to 5.4.4 which will be released today but we may have 5.4.5 out later this week.

Zane May 02, 2022 14:41 0 votes

Quick Question: Did you mean to select 95% across track overlap? We found one other log file that had a similar issue and it had 95% across track overlap shown in the log too. We are wondering that is something you did on purpose or if the app changed the value some how.

Zane May 02, 2022 19:57 0 votes

Wow, yes I will definitely be vocal with them as well. I get that they seem to want to pivot the whole pro vs enterprise play, however to have the flagship of a particular line/class lack analog functionality is ludicrous. The intent was clear with the notable deprecation of the word "PRO" for the obvious successor to the M2 Pro, but the A2 2/s never had it. Hopefully they will come around to at least honor this transitional generation for feature parity while they more clearly define AND communicate their product line strategy moving forward. Just like the whole no waypoints.. nope... none at all... oh well we mean except for hyperlapse... ooops!

Regarding the coverage question, that's a good observation, and no, my planned flight was set for 90, not 95. Now that you mention it, I had noticed a few times when my overlap was updated to something funky, and I had to set it back. I want to say that it was usually around the terrain mapping workflow/validation?

Richard Stanton May 04, 2022 08:26 0 votes

We have narrowed the issue down to narrow pass layouts and hope to submit a fix at the end of the week. Assuming there is nothing else pressing we need to add to that fix it should be available on Monday.

Zane May 04, 2022 14:57 0 votes