I’ve been having fits with my DJI Action 3 up until this past week, when I finally found a MicroSDXC card that was compatible with it; trying all ten of my existing cards (two of which are on the official DJI compatibility list) I was getting “card not compatible” errors and dropped sound and footage when it did actually record. With the new card, I can finally just turn the damn thing on and record. Having to wait around to see if it would bonk out and shut itself off was getting very irritating, and it sucks when you can’t depend on a piece of gear like that.

Meanwhile, after 11 years of working with GoPro cameras, I’ve run into my first problem with corrupt video files, and I can’t figure out how to fix them. I had a beautiful Sunday to work on the truck, and I made a conscious decision to set up the Hero5 on a tripod, external battery, and a 256GB card and just let it record what I was doing so I’d have some more footage to cut into and out of when I built a video. The first two files recorded fine, but everything after that corrupted; I wound up with about 30GB of files that I can’t view.

Most of the online solutions are Reddit threads directing to paid services (or copies of those threads; the Internet is a cesspool these days) but I did find a couple of suggestions that made sense. Opening and re-encoding in VLC didn’t work. Handbrake can’t even see the file as valid. I don’t have enough command-line experience with ffmpeg to understand how to use it—although I might be teaching myself in the immediate future. There’s an online service called restore.media that I fed a couple of files into, but haven’t seen any success with it. I guess I have to accept that all of that footage is gone, which really kind of sucks.

So I’m glad I was able to get one of the cameras working, because if I hadn’t, I would have no footage of the weekend’s work.