DJI Pocket 2 Camera and Drone Video Recording Time Limits

Our studio recently bought a DJI Pocket 2 pocket gimbal camera, and it didn’t take long to notice that its recording behavior differs from the Sony FDR-X3000 action camera we used before. Instead, it is more similar to the Nikon DSLR we have on hand, in that the recording time is capped at a fixed length (Nikon’s limit is 10 minutes), while the DJI caps each clip at a maximum of 5 minutes and 26 seconds.

Although I compared it to Nikon, the DJI still records continuously; it simply splits the saved footage into multiple consecutive segments automatically (as shown in the image below).

DJI camera recording time length

If you have used the drone series from the same company, you have probably run into the same issue. This is the result of the engineers adopting a relatively low compatibility memory card specification.

Due to the legacy of historical constraints, any memory card below 64GB can only use the FAT32 (32-bit File Allocation Table) file system format. But this specification has a problem: the size of a single file is limited to a maximum of 4GB (2^32) bytes.

In other words, 5 minutes and 26 seconds means that during recording, the video has already consumed 4GBytes of storage space, so the next video file must be saved as a separate segment (based on a shooting resolution of 4K 3840×2160 at 60 FPS).

Although memory cards above 64GB can be formatted with the extended exFAT file format, allowing a single file to reach 16 exbibytes - 1 (2^64 - 1 bits) bytes, the DJI development team chose not to release this capability for their own reasons and still relies only on the basic FAT32.

Well, it is said they were worried that a single file being too large could easily cause errors, so they deliberately crippled the feature. Honestly, that reasoning is acceptable; at least when I used the Sony action camera before, because battery capacity was hard to manage, there were times I shot a lot only to have the video vanish when the battery died.

Although I have gone on about all this, I know what everyone cares about most is whether different segment files can be joined seamlessly, just like uninterrupted continuous shooting!

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Using the dedicated DJI Mimo software for editing, you can easily (though somewhat slowly) import different segments into the same editing project and automatically join them end to end, but when playing across different segments you can still feel an obvious break.

Although this sense of interruption can be masked by adding transition effects (such as a dissolve), those who want purely uninterrupted shooting will need to think twice.

References

1. Product recommendation: DJI OSMO Pocket 2 pocket camera
2. Product reference: DJI drone series
3. DJI OSMO Pocket 2 pocket gimbal camera: What are the differences between the All-In-One Combo, the All-In-One Handle Combo, and the standard single-unit package? How to compare and choose?