Camera freeze and corrupt file on FS5

[Jeroen Wolf]

I was shooting for a documentary yesterday and somewhere in the middle of a long take I got an error message. Something in the order of 'retrieving file' or 'recovering file'. I'm not sure exactly but I have had these with my EX1 in the past and the camera was always able to do what it needed to do and get me back to work.
So after a few seconds the message disappeared and all was well, so I thought.

After the shoot I left the building and wanted to start shooting again outside. I turned the camera, it booted but did not respond to any buttons. Frozen. I turned the camera off and a few letters on the LCD screen would not disappear. So I disconnected the battery.

Then I put the battery back in and the camera was fine. I recorded another 30 minutes or so after that without issues.

When I came home: horror. The file with the most important recordings (about an hour long) was not there. I checked the card and noticed that there was a (recovery?) file of 16 GB. It has the extension .RSV. (apparently it is called reservation file)

I contacted Sony Pro Support in the UK. First I was told I would be called back on monday by a technician because they were closing down (5.15 PM, the website states they are open until 6PM??) but when I said I'd rather not have to wait all weekend, the receptionist told me I could call back in 30 minutes and a technician would answer the phone.

But when I called back exactly 30 minutes later I got an answering machine telling me they were closed for the weekend. Very professional for 'Pro Support'.

So I'm feeling like sh*t going into the weekend. Hopefully monday Sony can help me recover that clip. (I almost thought I had found the solution with Sony's recovery software but then I read it does not work with recording media other than Sony's...)

I shot 4K highest quality with the Transcend SDXC I U3, Class 10 card, read 95, write 60MB/s 64GB card. My Sony retailer told me his Sony connection said my card may be too slow but it meets the specs in the manual. (Interestingly though, there is no mention of card read/write speeds in that manual.)

This is very scary stuff but the flipside of shooting on 'consumer cards', perhaps. I'll keep you updated, not in the least on how professionally Sony deals with this.

If anyone ever succesfully managed to recover an .RSV file, I'd love to hear how you did it.

[Stephen Brenner]

You've got a great camera.
I'd stick with top of the line sandisk and lexar cards.
I stopped using transcend cards after several failures.

[Jeroen Wolf]

Sony has a service whereby you can send your card to them for data-recovery but the company says they cannot retrieve data from a non-Sony card due to software-restrictions. (patents or some such)

But even if it was a Sony card, there is obviously no guarantee the file could have been restored.

Transcend's RecoverX software was unsuccessful.

My hope is now that Transcend has more powerful software that can salvage something.

In the meanwhile, my card retailer has suggested -and I have followed his advice- to buy Sandisk Extreme Pro cards that have much higher write speeds. 95 vs 60 Mb/s