No GPS on your camera? Upload your RaceChrono file instead

Some cameras never record GPS. A DJI Osmo Action without the GPS remote, a phone on a mount, or footage you trimmed and re-exported before uploading. Until now that meant no lap times from Race Ninja and no overlays, however good the video was.

If you run RaceChrono, that's now solved. Export your session as a CSV, upload it next to your video, and we'll use your logger's GPS instead of the camera's.

How does uploading telemetry to a video with no GPS work?

Your logger knows where you were. Your video knows what you saw. Joining them comes down to a single moment.

We read the GPS out of your CSV and draw your whole session on a map, then find the first time your trace crosses the start/finish line. You scrub the video to that same crossing and set it, then send the session off to be processed. Everything lines up forward from that one point, so lap 1 begins where lap 1 actually began.

From there it runs the same results pipeline as any other session. Lap times, sector splits, speed traces, your overlays, the coaching.

Which data loggers can I use with Race Ninja?

Today, one: a RaceChrono Pro CSV export, saved in its Format 3. RaceChrono records from a lot of different hardware, so if your RaceBox or another unit already feeds RaceChrono, you're covered.

That's the honest limit of it. We started here because RaceChrono is widely used and its export is cleanly structured, not because it's the only thing worth supporting.

What if I use a different lap timer?

Then we'd like to hear from you. Building the first one was the hard part. The machinery underneath now takes a logger's data and turns it into the format everything else already understands, which makes MyChron, Unipro, Draggy and the rest a far smaller job than they were a week ago.

Send us a sample export on Discord and tell us what you run. That's genuinely how this got built.

Thank you, Ash

This one deserves saying properly. A Pro subscriber called Ash got in touch because his overlays were coming out empty, an Osmo Action 6 paired with a RaceBox Micro and nothing to show for it.

He didn't stop at reporting it. Ash sent us his RaceChrono exports and the full video from a session at Daytona Milton Keynes, then kept answering questions while we pulled it all apart and put it back together. Every lap time quoted in this post was measured against his data. Without a real session from a real driver, this would still be a nice idea we hadn't tested.

So, thanks Ash. We wouldn't have got this over the line without you.

This is early, so tell us what breaks

We've run it on real sessions. At Daytona Milton Keynes our quickest lap came out 0.16s off the best lap RaceChrono reported for the same session, which is close enough to trust and honest enough to publish. But we don't have a big pile of no-GPS footage covering every logger and camera out there. You do.

If a lap starts in the wrong place, or your trace won't line up with your track, or anything just looks wrong, post it in Discord and we'll dig into it. We'd much rather hear about it early than have you quietly give up on a session. If you're not sure whether your camera records GPS at all, the supported cameras page spells out which models do.

Be honest with us and we'll be honest back. This is a fresh feature with a lot of moving parts, and some of them are meeting the real world for the first time this week. Something will misbehave. When it does, we want to hear it from you rather than find out six months later that people quietly stopped bothering.

Come and help us build the rest of it

There's a staggering amount of data sitting on people's loggers right now. Lap after lap of it, on kit from half a dozen different manufacturers, most of it never doing anything useful once the session ends. And there's nowhere that brings it together with the footage from the same lap.

That's what we want to be. Not a RaceChrono tool, not a GoPro tool, but the place your data goes whatever recorded it.

We can't get there on our own, because we don't own every logger on the market and we can't guess at file formats we've never seen. What we can do is work through them one at a time with the people who actually run them. If that's you, come and find us on Discord. Tell us what you use, throw us an export, tell us where it falls over. That's the whole job from here.