Same CF Cards as the XF line?

[drummondb]

Hi all. I'm going to be shooting with the C300 for the first time next week. I have several Transcend 400x 64GB cards that work perfectly in my XF105. I assumed these cards would work in the C300 as well (since it's recording the same exact same codec) but now I'm reading some people are having problems with those cards.

Can anyone confirm those cards won't work? And why would the C300 be more picky than the XF line about what cards it will use?

[cowpunk52]

I can confirm that those Transcend cards will not work for file spanning or slow-motion on the C300. They will work for normal speed shooting up to 1080p30 until the clip needs to span (@ 2GB or approx 5:11). Those cards also did not work for spanning or slow-mo in my XF300. I never tried in the XF100, only used Sandisk Extreme cards and those worked a treat.

[drummondb]

That's so strange. We've been using an XF105 (along with a pair of XH-A1's with Sony CF recorders) for over a year, and we've never had any issues with the Transcend 400x 64 cards at all. We've shot hour upon hour with them.

Oh well, next week will be a great test for me. I'll have a C300, the Transcend cards in question, and a few Sandisk Extremes. I'll report back with my findings.

[cowpunk52]

You may have an exceptionally good Transcend card. It's a bit of a lottery whether unapproved or untested cards will work in all modes with the XF codec. Let us know how it does in the C300 and if it will record to full!

[drummondb]

UPDATE: I shot about 500 GB of footage with the C300 last week. Most was at 1080/24p 50mbps. Almost all of the footage was shot with the Transcend 400x 64 GB cards, including some long shoots where we recorded meetings that were several hours long. The cards worked ALMOST flawlessly.

I say "almost" because there was one problem. On the last day of shooting, one of the cards simply died. It didn't seem to have a problem recording the data. It just died shortly after I initialized it (initialized for at least the 10th time that week, certainly). I tried formatting the card in a PC, and it still wouldn't work. The same thing happened to another one of these Transcend cards several months ago (not in the C300).

I can't really complain. We bought 6 of these cards in March 2011, and we've shot hundreds of hours of footage with them. We've initialized them in-camera tens or hundreds of times. I'm not sure if that will eventually wear the card out.

[alpi69]

I use the Sandisks and they work. It is such a risk to go "cheap" on the CF-cards...I´d say it is not worth it.