How to organize drone footage by person
After a session flying over a group, taking turns filming each of them, there's still
the job of getting everyone their own clips. Here's how to split hundreds of
DJI_0157.MP4 files into folders named after each person.
Why drone footage is especially awkward to sort
Three things set it apart from ground footage:
- The subject is far away and small. The single first frame your file browser shows you is almost never enough to tell who it is. Right after takeoff it's often just sky or dirt.
- One flight covers several people. A single battery has A in it and B in it, so the split between people doesn't line up neatly with the split between files.
- The filename is just a counter.
DJI_0157carries nothing but a time.
Which leaves opening them one by one — and at two hundred clips that alone runs past half an hour.
The .LRF and .SRT files DJI writes alongside
| Extension | What it is | Safe to delete? |
|---|---|---|
.LRF | Low-resolution proxy video | App preview only. Nothing to do with the original |
.SRT | Flight log (altitude, coordinates, timestamps) | Keep it if you want the record |
.SRT is a subtitle format, but what's inside is flight data. Some people burn it into
the picture as an overlay when editing, so give it a thought before deleting.
whosewave only picks up video extensions. .LRF and
.SRT never enter the list in the first place, so there's no need to clear them out
beforehand.
When one clip has several people in it
This is the situation you hit most often with drone footage: A and B are both in the same clip, and there's no right answer to whose folder it belongs in.
So a clip can be assigned to several people. Use Shift+number, or the ＋ button on the name chip, and it keeps adding people instead of advancing to the next clip.
| Mode | What happens to a clip with several names |
|---|---|
| Move | The original goes to the first person's folder, the rest get copies |
| Copy | Copies in every person's folder, original stays put |
Either way, everyone you assigned gets that clip. You never have to pick one person and drop the others.
Every copy costs disk space. If you're shooting a lot of 4K and assigning several people often, check your free space before running it. The organize screen shows you how many clips are headed into each folder first.
The steps
- Copy the drone's SD card to your computer.
- Choose that folder in whosewave.
.LRFand.SRTdon't appear; only the video does. - Look at four frames and assign a name. Each clip shows four frames pulled from the body of the video, so you can usually tell who's in it without playing anything. If you're unsure, click a frame to start playback from that point.
- Several people? Shift+number to keep adding, then move on.
- Hit organize.
The four frames come from splitting the clip into six parts, dropping the first and last, and taking the middle of the four that remain. On drone footage the ends are usually takeoff, landing, or hunting for the subject, so those middle four are far likelier to have a person in them.
Previewing D-Log and 10-bit footage
DJI footage opens in the browser whether it's H.264, H.265 or D-Log 10-bit. That said, HEVC (H.265) depends on the machine.
- Windows — you may need HEVC Video Extensions from the Microsoft Store. Check
Video Acceleration Information at
chrome://gpu. - macOS — works as-is, nothing to install.
Footage shot in D-Log previews looking flatter and washed out compared to the final look. That's just log footage before grading; there's nothing wrong with the file, and it makes no difference to recognizing who's in it.
Even when the preview doesn't come up at all, naming and organizing still work normally. Codec-by-codec support is written up under camera support.