How AirStory works — for pilots who want the details

The core idea

Your drone already recorded everything. DJI just didn't tell you.

Every clip gets a companion .LRF file — a small 720p proxy your drone makes for scrubbing.
Buried inside it: an embedded telemetry stream, ~30 samples a second — on whether or not you ever turned on subtitles.
One file, two jobs — the video inside is the browser-playable proxy, and the data behind it.

The whole library is built by reading that one file:

exiftool -ee3 -G3 -api RequestAll=3 -j flight.LRF
# → ~30 Hz of GPS, altitude, attitude, gimbal, exposure — per frame

The data

What's in the stream.

A few thousand timestamped samples per flight. Each one carries:

Field	What it drives
GPS lat / lon	The map line and the 3D ribbon
Altitude	The altitude chart + terrain height in 3D
Yaw / pitch / roll	Which way the drone was pointed
Gimbal angle	Where the camera was actually looking
ISO / shutter / f-number	The exposure, frame by frame

Speed & climb are derived from the GPS track, smoothed to kill the jitter.
Stored in raw SI, converted to your units (feet and mph, or metric via Settings) only when drawn — the data stays honest.

Your originals never move. The .LRF carries the proxy and the data, so your 4K masters never upload. When you want a finished cut, the Mac app slices the real originals frame-accurately, on your machine.

Import

Drop in the card.

Scans the card, decodes each flight, grabs a thumbnail.
Names the place — the takeoff point becomes a real park, beach, or town.
Idempotent — SD card, phone download, or Photos export all resolve to the same flight. Nothing duplicates.
No .LRF? Still works. Neo / Avata / Osmo hide data in the MP4; Neo 2 uses an .SRT — all read. Zero readable data (an AirDropped clip) still imports as a video-only flight.

Relive

Every flight becomes a cockpit.

Video, map trace, altitude chart, and a speed/heading HUD — all on one clock.
The altitude chart is the scrubber. Drag it, the video seeks, the map arrow swings.
3D theater: your flight rebuilt over real terrain — actual elevation + satellite imagery, path drawn as a speed-colored ribbon.
Chase, orbit, POV, or free-fly the scene — with the video playing picture-in-picture.

Find the good parts

Auto-Story finds the moments for you.

A maneuver detector reads the telemetry and recognizes the shapes of good footage:

Orbits — sustained turns around a point
Reveals — a climb or tilt that opens up a vista
Dives & low passes — fast drops and ground-skimming runs
Speed runs, climb-outs & pans — the other keepers

Scores them, keeps the best, honors any clips you marked yourself.
Stitches with crossfades + a music bed, cuts nudged onto the beat.
Pick Short, Medium, or Long → a finished video with a shareable link.

None of this is magic.

Careful plumbing around a file DJI ships but doesn't document — plus a lot of taste about what to do with the data. The hard part was never the extraction. It was making a hard drive full of forgotten flights feel like a library you'd actually open.

Built by a DJI pilot with too many clips he'd never watch again. Tested first-hand on the Mini 4 Pro and Neo 2 — the rest of the current lineup shares the same telemetry format, so it should just work. If yours doesn't, tell us and we'll make it.

Want to try it on your own flights?

AirStory is open — free to start, and your first sign-in creates your account.

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