16g card problem, any ideas? Only recording 8 minutes, trashing the rest.

[filmstox]

Some 16g cards are causing a major problem for one of my clients. Has anyone experienced this?

My HVX is out on a rental with 16g cards rented from another supplier. I just got word form the shoot that one of the cards is only recording to the 8 minute mark and any data recorded after that point is lost. They are doing a short in one continuous shot thats 12 minutes long. They have 2 cards, one is fine, the other is loosing the last 4 minutes of the take.

The camera does not throw any errors while recording. Playback from the effected card in camera will stop 8 minutes in.

I am having them compare the data coming off of the good card compared to the bad one to see if the 2nd half of the take is saved to a separate .mxf file, and if it is present on the bad card to see if I can use raylight to read these portions of the file that the camera and final cut are unable to read.

Details:
NTSC HVX recording 720@60P
FCP 6.0.0
QT 7.2
Powerbook running 10.4.10

We upgraded the firmware on both my HVX and P2Store prior to them leaving my shop and ran complete tests on both cards prior to the shoot, so it seems to me that the card went bad mid-shoot.

If anyone has experienced this or as any ideas to offer, please let me know here or via e-mail, dsmith at edgecentric.com

Thanks,
David

 

[filmstox]

Update...

So it looks as if the card tried to create the clip for the 2nd half of the file and failed. In the VIDEO folder we have the .mxf file for the first 8 minutes, then a .mxf file for the rest that is only a few k in size.

 

[dvInsight]

Dave,
I used a set of 4 rented 16GB cards last week on a shoot and one card out of the four had a problem with clips in the last few minutes of the card. It manifested itself by the last recorded clip showing up as incomplete in P2 import in FCP 6.

This happened even if 3 or 4 minutes were left on the card. The problem moved from HVX200 to HPX500 on the same card. So we obviously stopped using that card and returned it to the rental house. I wish I had written down the serial number of it becuase I would hate to see them keep renting it.

This was my first experience with any P2 card issues. Hopefully it is not a production problem with the 16s.

Good luck, and you may just have to chalk it up to a problem card.

Rob (from the Costco shoot)