Not long after DJI began offering users an easy way to access GPS data for their drone videos, Remote GeoSystems, a geospatial video technology start-up, became the first company to offer a commercial-level map-based immersive video playback software suite for the world’s largest drone company.
That was back in 2015, when the Inspire 1 and Phantom 3 Pro began letting users log a .SRT file with continuous GPS data synced with the .MP4 video clips.
Since then DJI has launched the Inspire 2, Phantom 4 & 4 Pro, Mavic Pro all very capable units for professional survey, mapping, inspection and search and rescue jobs using geospatial video and traditional photogrammetry. On the even higher-end are the M200 and M600 series which have become commonplace drones alongside the Cessna and Beechcraft manned airplanes in the fleets of survey and mapping companies. For non-BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight), one could argue there isn’t a more affordable fleet of drones for that cam perform at this level.
Along with the changes in the DJI product line also came many changes with full motion video geotagging capabilities. The team here at Remote Geo has worked diligently to keep our LineVision and Video GeoTagger software up-to-date to support all the current DJI UAV GPS logging formats and to also be back-compatible with most of the various DJI models.
“…it must be a camera hardware thing, as the P4P’s camera and X4S camera (for Inspire 2 / M200 etc.) are the same camera hardware and both embed the data to the video file, whereas the Z30 zoom camera created a separate file when mounted beside the x4s on the M210RTK.” —Commercial Utility and Search & Rescue UAV Operator
Currently we support 7 different SRT companion file formats for DJI drone models. For example, the video recording of the FLIR Zenmuse XT2 SRT file log is different than if you did not have the XT2 on the very same model of UAV. With the DJI hardware and firmware, very little stays consistent and Remote Geo has to periodically update Video GeoTagger and LineVision and other software to accommodate the changes DJI makes.
Below is a breakdown of how the Remote GeoSystems software stack can accommodate the various DJI drone systems.
In Video GeoTagger FREE edition you can:
– Directly open and map video from applicable DJI models that log a companion SRT file with the video. To see an example of this Click Here
– For models that do not have SRT file logging, you can geotag the video by using the Flight Record Log file to “automatically” sync the videos to the right location on the GPS track. To see an example of this here:
– Based on customer feedback the following DJI models should support recording video with the SRT file: Mavic Pro, Inspire 1 & 2, Phantom 3 Pro, Phantom 4 Standard (it seems there is NOT SRT file logging capability with the Phantom 4 Pro.)
In Video GeoTagger PRO edition you can:
– Directly open and map video from applicable DJI models that allow for the GPS data to be logged in the closed captioning of the video. To see an example of this here:
We should note that all LineVision Desktop, Server and Add-ins/Extensions and reporting software will soon also soon offer all DJI GPS support as the Video GeoTagger editions above.