Nothing recorded on SDHC card

[Marcus Durham]

All the focus is on the media here but there's no focus on the camera. I remain to be convinced the problem wasn't having both slots in use simultaneously. Due to the way the USB bus works the slots may well be sharing bandwidth. The slightest disruption to the data flow to the slot recording the footage would result in a fault.

It's akin to when I burn discs on my external Blu-Ray burner. I've learnt the hard way that it's remarkably easy to trash a burn process by disrupting the USB bus. Eject an external hard drive or plug in certain devices when burning and you can wave goodbye to your disc. I daresay I could also max out the USB bus as well and cause a failed write.

SxS won't suffer this because it works differently (the same way it's much harder to trip up Firewire devices compared to USB). Potentially the data going across the USB bus has been doubled during the formatting process and some corruption has occurred. While the data rate will be within the USB spec nobody knows what parameters the camera is operating under internally.

I suspect the reason nobody has come across it before is because most would consider it very bad practice to be fiddling with card I/O operations on the camera while it is recording.

I'm still also interested to hear what firmware was in use and what the age of the MxR cards was.

[Andy Taplin]

Originally Posted by Anthony McErlean

I used 32GB SXS card at a wedding one time and it let me down when I needed it most.
Fell back to my ATP/MxM combo that worked 100%

That's really bad luck Anthony - was it a faulty card or some other issue?

Of course nothing is guaranteed in life, love or electronics :-) but my philosophy is not to knowingly introduce a weak link into the chain - like SD cards. I know SxS are expensive but they should last many years and if you are being paid to do a job it's a reasonable cost over that time period.

[Anthony McErlean]

Originally Posted by Andy Taplin

That's really bad luck Anthony - was it a faulty card or some other issue?

Of course nothing is guaranteed in life, love or electronics :-) but my philosophy is not to knowingly introduce a weak link into the chain - like SD cards. I know SxS are expensive but they should last many years and if you are being paid to do a job it's a reasonable cost over that time period.

Hard to say for sure Andy but I put it down to the card. I got the card replaced and so far, no problems.

I agree with you about the SxS Cards,

[Joe Oliverio]

I sincerely apologize to everyone. It turns out it was not a card error, it was an operator error. MINE!.

I thought I shot to 4 cards but both shows were recorded to 3 cards instead. The 4th card is really empty although it did have the restore media message.

So lessons learned:

1. Find a better way to keep track and label cards as they are used.
2. Don't get in a position where you are panicking to deal with cards right before the show starts.
3.It's OK to format one card while recording to another.
4.Wait a few days before posting to the Forum and getting everybody in a tizzy.
5. In this business, develop a fondness for crow because you end up eating it a lot.

Thanks everyone for your concern and ideas for help.

JoeO.

[Anthony McErlean]

Only glad to hear it all worked out good in the end but still keep an eye on that card with the restore message.
Can you get it replaced?

Originally Posted by Joe Oliverio

3.It's OK to format one card while recording to another.
JoeO.

Wouldn't want to do that Joe.
Format all your cards in advance and let the camera just do the recording.
Thats enough for anybody :)

[Marcus Durham]

Originally Posted by Joe Oliverio

3.It's OK to format one card while recording to another.

It really isn't. There is too much potential for error if wrangling with cards on location.

Say you mix up your cards in your bag. You then insert a new card into the camera. You see its full and just format it without being able to check the contents. You've just erased footage from earlier in the day. When you get home you have a blank card and then start wondering why.

Never perform destructive operations on cards during a shoot. It's too pressurised and one small error could end up costing you dear. This applies to SxS, SDHC, Compact Flash, tape, punch cards or any storage medium. Once your data is gone, it's gone.

Glad you are OK though and am glad we haven't uncovered a potential "gotcha" with SDHC.

[Marcus Durham]

Re the Media Restore - Chances are it wasn't cleanly dismounted the last time it was used (camera turned off early or ejected from a computer before it had cleanly dismounted) or has been inserted in a computer that has put extra files on it.

Media restore usually means the EX1 isn't happy with something on the XML side of things or it didn't finishing writing properly during the last operation. If you can't repeat it in testing, don't worry about it.

Not forgetting the usual disclaimer of making sure the camera is on the latest firmware and the adaptors aren't old. Big difference in performance between the adaptors I was buying in 2009 and the latest gen of MxM's I use in 2011. Also big changes with the newer firmware regarding any device connected via USB.

[Tuy Le]

Last weekend on a 3 days event, we used 25 cards: 1 SxS 32GB, 2 ATP 32GB, 4 ATP16G, 1 Patriot 16GB, Transcend 16GB & 32GB and the rest of the cards were Sandisk 16GB. 2 Sandisk 16GB cards were not formatted or deleted prior to the event... so during the shooting I had to format it (record on A or B slot and format on other slot). I was kind of worry but all went thru without any problem (all transfer to computer and work !).

So I can tell you that you can format a SDHC card during shooting with other SDHC card, but only do it when you don't have any choice (Sandisk is Class 4 - Ultra II)

When SDHC card give a warning msg "restore media", I would remove it and test it out later.

[Anthony McErlean]

I needed one SDHC card to record an event yesterday.

I took an ATP/MXM combo that I had used before and though I'll make another copy of this card before I format it.

When I put the combo into the PC nothing happened.
Repeated this 4/5 times without success.

Couldn't understand this because I copied this card to two other hard drives a few days before.

I then took the ATP card out of the MXM adaptor put it back in and this time the PC did see the card, I was then able to format it to use later that night

So what happened there, was it the card or was it the adapter?

Thanks.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Originally Posted by Marcus Durham

My first thought is what on earth were you doing formatting a card in one slot when the other slot was in use? Do you not check your cards before you start? To my mind you shouldn't be performing file operations on another slot when the first slot is recording regardless of the media in use.

Although Markus is basically right that one shouldn't perform any operations on one card while the other one is being recorded to, I personally did that many times, and never had a single problem. And, I'm talking about the USB cards, not the faster SxS Pro ones!

The first scenario when it happened was recording a very long, uninterrupted event with my nanoFlash on 2x 64GB CF cards (at 50 Mbps, this is several hours recording). Since I always record to the EX internal cards as well, and at that time I only had 16GB SDHC cards in both slots - when one SDHC card filled up and the camera switched to the other one, I'd simple delete all clips from the first card - so that after filling up the other one, the camera could switch back to the first one and continue recording. No problems..

The other scenario was when the "Media needs to be restored" displayed to me (back when I was using the less reliable Sandisk class 4 in MxR adapters), and the camera switched to the other slot. Again I didn't want to interrupt the recording, so - while keeping recording on that other slot - I executed media restore on the offending card. Again, no probs whatsoever.

Recently - with the excellent MxM adapters, and much better ATP Pro cards (class 6 or 10) - the "media needs to be restored" never happens, but I still do sometimes operate on both cards simultaneously (recording to one, doing some house-keeping on the other)...

Piotr