Which files are important?

I’d like to know which of the mission files the app generates are really important. Is it enough to keep the main mission file (.p4d), copy the original photo files from the SD card of my Phantom into the same folder and start processing?

With my first project this worked and the result was okay but at the end I asked myself if the result could be better using all of the files in the original folder (mission_00000X).

Hey Marcel, my understanding is that you need the P4D file that is created by the app, and the images (on-board sd card, phone, or downloaded from the cloud) to create a project. That’s only for the P2V and P2V+ because of the quality of the geotags of the original images. If you have a P3 or I1 you can just take the images straight off the sd card because they have the full resolution geotags and you don’t need the geotags included in the P4D file that the app creates. Hope that helps.

Hey Matthew. Thanks for attention.

I’m using a P3 pro - so I don’t even need the app generated P4D file? Where did you read it? Is the P3 GPS logging/EXIF-writing that accurate compared to P2 Vision versions?

Independently to GPS issues there is a .json file for example that comes along with

  • […] “mFocalLength”:13.0,“mImageHeight”:3456,“mImageWidth”:4608,“mSensorHeight”:5.7,“mSensorWidth”:7.6,“pixelSize”:1.40739" […]

So I was wondering, if the pixel size and focal length and other lines in this file are maybe helpful while processing in the desktop software or is Pix4D able to read it all out of the EXIF data of the taken pictures?

I tried it for myself. Just took the images from the memory card, processed them without the mission file(s) and it seems, that the GPS and other metadata of the taken images of the Phantom 3 Pro are as exact as the external logged data. The result is optical similar to the one using the mission file(s). Don’t know if there are differences in measuring accuracy 'cause I don’t have a paid version.