bmcc87
04-17-2012, 12:40 PM
Went on a shoot for the first time this week with a new AC-AG160 and am having major issues with my files.
Before going out, I did record about 20 minutes and 11 clips on the camera just to make sure it was working properly. I plugged the SD card into my computer’s slot, copied and pasted all the files, imported them into FCP. No problems. Afterwards, I deleted all the clips I took (minus the first two or three) through the camera. I did not delete them from the computer.
Fast forward to my shoot yesterday. Throughout the shoot everything appeared to be recording just fine. Near the end, I turned the camera off to move to a different location. I believe I waited long enough that the camera was done writing to the SD card, but I’m not 100% sure. In any case, when I turned the camera back on I received an error message saying, “Control Data Error. Repairing.” Eventually the message came up saying repairing was finished, so I moved on. I continued recording and never received any kind of error message while recording. Every time I powered off the camera and turned it back on though, I received the same error message.
When I got home I tried the same process of copying and pasting the clips to a hard drive and importing into FCP. At this point I was only able to see 4 of the 35 different clips on the card in FCP. Only in about two of these clips, was I able to actually watch the entire clip. The other two clips cut off in random spots. The card was lent to me by the company that sold me the camera, as a loaner, until the cards I purchased came in. I tried playing the MTS files through VLC player, which normally works, but I had the same result.
I tried using the CD that came with the camera to run the AVC restore, although admittedly its possible I could have done something wrong in this process. I used all three methods offered in the program, restore from folder, from files, and restoring the card itself. All three times achieved the same result. The program told me that the restoration was successful, however when I tried to load the clips into FCP, I could only see 5 clips (only one more than before the restore). I still am not able to watch all of even these clips. Interestingly enough, all the ClipInf files appeared to be there before the restore. After the restore, they are all gone except five. I’m sure its no coincidence that the numbers on the inf files remaining match the numbers on the MTS files that I can view.
I’ve tried everything I can think of to get the video on these files in a viewable/editable format; I tried downloading the AVC plugin for FCP and importing directly, I tried aimersoft media convertor and all have the same result. I can view the same 5 or so files and nothing else. I know from the file sizes on the other 30 files though, that there is something there. There are large file sizes (100mb and more) so I’m assuming some sort of data was written, I just can’t access it.
So my question is two-fold. First off, I am wondering if anyone here would have insights or know of any possible way that I could recover these files. I’m obviously hoping to avoid the embarrassing scenario of having to reshoot (thankfully I did this shoot for free as a favor to someone). As I said there appears to be some sort of data in the video files themselves but it seems that the problem is with all the other files connected to it (the inf, playlist files etc)
Secondly, I would like to know for future reference if anybody has any clue what might have caused the error so I can avoid this happening in the future. Another thread I found here mentioned the possibility of this error occurring when the camera is used with third party batteries. I don’t think this is the cause in my case because I used the Panasonic battery that came with the camera. I’m guessing that perhaps it was related to one of a couple of issues:
1) Poor or faulty SD card? As I said before the SD card was a loaner from the dealer I got the camera from. It is an off-brand (Kingston) and upon looking it up on Amazon, I found it had pretty poor reviews.
2) The card was not formatted properly? I never reformatted the card upon putting it in the camera because it had some footage left on it and I didn’t want to delete somebody else’s stuff. Perhaps this was a mistake on my end, but the card did appear to already be formatted for the AVCHD file structure. Also, the recorded files worked just fine the first time I tried it.
3) Improper protocol? I’m new to this camera so I thought perhaps I wasn’t supposed to just directly copy and paste all the files off the SD card (I did copy the whole card, not just the mts files) and maybe that caused a problem somehow.
In any case, I apologize for the long post but wanted to see if anyone else here might have had experience with these sorts of problems, and I wanted to document it for people in the future who may run into them. Primarily I am concerned with recovering my footage, but I would also like to pin down the cause of this to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Thoughts?
Before going out, I did record about 20 minutes and 11 clips on the camera just to make sure it was working properly. I plugged the SD card into my computer’s slot, copied and pasted all the files, imported them into FCP. No problems. Afterwards, I deleted all the clips I took (minus the first two or three) through the camera. I did not delete them from the computer.
Fast forward to my shoot yesterday. Throughout the shoot everything appeared to be recording just fine. Near the end, I turned the camera off to move to a different location. I believe I waited long enough that the camera was done writing to the SD card, but I’m not 100% sure. In any case, when I turned the camera back on I received an error message saying, “Control Data Error. Repairing.” Eventually the message came up saying repairing was finished, so I moved on. I continued recording and never received any kind of error message while recording. Every time I powered off the camera and turned it back on though, I received the same error message.
When I got home I tried the same process of copying and pasting the clips to a hard drive and importing into FCP. At this point I was only able to see 4 of the 35 different clips on the card in FCP. Only in about two of these clips, was I able to actually watch the entire clip. The other two clips cut off in random spots. The card was lent to me by the company that sold me the camera, as a loaner, until the cards I purchased came in. I tried playing the MTS files through VLC player, which normally works, but I had the same result.
I tried using the CD that came with the camera to run the AVC restore, although admittedly its possible I could have done something wrong in this process. I used all three methods offered in the program, restore from folder, from files, and restoring the card itself. All three times achieved the same result. The program told me that the restoration was successful, however when I tried to load the clips into FCP, I could only see 5 clips (only one more than before the restore). I still am not able to watch all of even these clips. Interestingly enough, all the ClipInf files appeared to be there before the restore. After the restore, they are all gone except five. I’m sure its no coincidence that the numbers on the inf files remaining match the numbers on the MTS files that I can view.
I’ve tried everything I can think of to get the video on these files in a viewable/editable format; I tried downloading the AVC plugin for FCP and importing directly, I tried aimersoft media convertor and all have the same result. I can view the same 5 or so files and nothing else. I know from the file sizes on the other 30 files though, that there is something there. There are large file sizes (100mb and more) so I’m assuming some sort of data was written, I just can’t access it.
So my question is two-fold. First off, I am wondering if anyone here would have insights or know of any possible way that I could recover these files. I’m obviously hoping to avoid the embarrassing scenario of having to reshoot (thankfully I did this shoot for free as a favor to someone). As I said there appears to be some sort of data in the video files themselves but it seems that the problem is with all the other files connected to it (the inf, playlist files etc)
Secondly, I would like to know for future reference if anybody has any clue what might have caused the error so I can avoid this happening in the future. Another thread I found here mentioned the possibility of this error occurring when the camera is used with third party batteries. I don’t think this is the cause in my case because I used the Panasonic battery that came with the camera. I’m guessing that perhaps it was related to one of a couple of issues:
1) Poor or faulty SD card? As I said before the SD card was a loaner from the dealer I got the camera from. It is an off-brand (Kingston) and upon looking it up on Amazon, I found it had pretty poor reviews.
2) The card was not formatted properly? I never reformatted the card upon putting it in the camera because it had some footage left on it and I didn’t want to delete somebody else’s stuff. Perhaps this was a mistake on my end, but the card did appear to already be formatted for the AVCHD file structure. Also, the recorded files worked just fine the first time I tried it.
3) Improper protocol? I’m new to this camera so I thought perhaps I wasn’t supposed to just directly copy and paste all the files off the SD card (I did copy the whole card, not just the mts files) and maybe that caused a problem somehow.
In any case, I apologize for the long post but wanted to see if anyone else here might have had experience with these sorts of problems, and I wanted to document it for people in the future who may run into them. Primarily I am concerned with recovering my footage, but I would also like to pin down the cause of this to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Thoughts?