VIRB Edit 2.5.2 using the wrong track for clips despite replacement

I ran into a weird track alignment (again) problem in 2.5.2 yesterday. Took the Elite along on a mountain bike ride, 720p@30fps. Got home, extracted the video and track from the VIRB with VIRB Edit. Put the video together, added the overlays, and saw that the initial altitude wasn't altogether ridiculous, only about 20 ft off. So things are looking up for this video. Unfortunately, at about 20 minutes in the VIRB (running 3.7) dropped all three ANT+ sensors (HR, Tempe, magnetless cadence). So time to replace the track with the one from my Edge 800.

There were three clips. I stopped at about 1:30 and shut the camera off while stopped, and then stopped again at 2:07. Since I forgot my spare battery, I didn't turn the camera on after the second stop. I had maybe 15 minutes of battery left at that point and 40 minutes left in the ride.

So, I replaced the track for clip 1, and as usual the alignment was off, so I used the adjuster. (The 800 was plugged in and mounted, so I let VIRB Edit find the right track itself.) Clip 2, and the strange thing was 1) it found the beginning of the clip, 2) on the map, it was only showing on the map the portion of the track from that clip. Unfortunately, when I told it to replace, it didn't bring along the HR, cadence or temperature data. Those were still blank, as if it was using the VIRB track instead of the 800. I even tried removing GPS from the clip first and replacing from the 800 again without success.

So I took a closer look and VIRB Edit was showing the single track from the 800 as three different portions, beginning at the proper times. But without the data it was pointless to replace the track that way. I wound up doing a manual replace with the track from the 800, and that worked as well as usual (alignment was off but easy enough to fix for all three clips). So on the plus side, it can now detect the beginning of a clip with respect to the track. On the minus side, it doesn't actually seem to be using the replacement track.

0 Former Member over 10 years ago

It took me a while to get what's going on here. Does this seem right?

Your Edge 800 track was assumed to be a sub track of your VIRB's recorded FIT track.

I think it'd be hard to get this to happen, but if both the start and end points of the track recorded on your Edge happen to be contained in the track recorded by your VIRB, with the exact same time/location data recorded, it could occur. While this would be unlikely usually, I can imagine this data reliably being in sync if the VIRB Elite and Edge were paired in some way. I'm not sure that was the case here.

How did you "manually" fix this issue? Discarding the auto-assigned backing FIT file from a track like this seems like an awkward task.

Am I also right in thinking this was chiefly a problem because the VIRB Elite FIT track didn't have the stats data that your Edge track had? It seems like this could have worked out for you otherwise.

0 schinder over 10 years ago

Yes, the reason I had to replace the track in the first place is that the VIRB dropped the ANT+ sensors, so the track from the VIRB didn't have the ANT+ data for the entire ride. That was the initial motivation. But as I discovered last weekend, where I had a successful 3:09 recording session that kept the ANT+ sensors connected the entire time and didn't start with a ridiculous altitude reading, I would have wound up replacing the track anyway, since I turned the camera off during the ride. So the VIRB made two FIT tracks covering the entire ride. As I learned, there's no way to set distance/duration properly if that happens. We really need a way to set those by hand to get them right, not just by aligning to a track, because with two (or more) tracks you can't set to the beginning of the first.

So anyway, in replacing the track, since the 800 was already plugged in and mounted, I let VIRB Edit find the right track on the 800. As you know, it shows the entire list of tracks that are available on the device, but also seems to select the right one based on date/time. The weird thing was that VIRB Edit was showing the single track on the 800 as three separate tracks, starting at the clip start times. I don't know why it did that, but I do know that replacement didn't work for the second and third clips. The solution was to not let VIRB Edit figure out which track on the 800 to use, but to click on "Manual" (I'm not at home at the moment, so I can't look at VIRB Edit to get the button names exactly right), and, after navigating to the right track, choosing it for the replacement. It recognized that as an entire single track covering the entire ride, so it had no trouble replacing the tracks, aside from the usual alignment problems. At some point I copied the track from the 800 to my computer and dismounted the 800 to make things a little easier, but it didn't seem to matter.

I just realized that the VIRB may have been plugged in and mounted with the 800. Could it possibly have been showing me the tracks available on the 800 and on the VIRB at the same time?