Arri / Windows Incompatibility

Run&Gun

Run&Gun

Veteran
Stumbled across something at the end of a shoot the other day that I hadn't run into before, as most people in this business seem to usually use Mac's. When we wrapped shooting, I handed the card from my Amira to the producer to dump to a drive and her laptop kept throwing this weird error. Something to the effect of "Drive Not Inserted" whenever the card was put into the reader(Arri Certified Anglebird cards and reader, both). Of course I made a semi joking comment(only 7% joking) about it being a windows computer. But to be safe, I popped the card back into the camera and of course everything was there.

We decided, since I did not have my laptop there and the other crew with a MBP had already left(no issues dumping footage earlier in the day), that I would try to upload the footage to their servers overnight or just ship a drive the next day. When I got home, I hooked the reader up to my RMBP and the card was immediately visible and all files were there and playable with just a click. I text the producer and told them everything was fine on my end, so they had the ingest people send me a link and I uploaded the files overnight, so the client was happy.

Fast forward about 24 hours and I was on Arri's forum messing around and stumbled across this:

We received reports and can confirm that recent updates for Windows 10 and Windows 11 have caused an incompatibility with different types of UDF formatted recording media.

This issue affects the following products and formats:
• ALEXA Mini LF with Codex Compact Drives
• ALEXA Mini with CFast 2.0 cards
• AMIRA with CFast 2.0 cards
We have informed Microsoft about the issue and are trying to find a solution with their team.
For the time being, however, the only option is to roll back Windows to the state before the following updates:
• Windows 10: Nov 22, 2021—KB5007253 (OS Builds 19041.1387, 19042.1387, 19043.1387, and 19044.1387) Preview
• Windows 11: Nov 22, 2021—KB5007262 (OS Build 22000.348) Preview
Note that it may be necessary to uninstall all subsequent updates one by one to get back to the working state.
For assistance rolling back your Windows OS, please contact Microsoft support via their support page.

We apologise for the troubles.
Kind regards, your team at ARRI
Oliver Temmler
Product Manager Storage Media
ARRI Munich
Click to expand...
 
Yep, there have been issues with the new M1 macs as well. Definitely important to confirm you have a viable machine on-set for wrangling when shooting on Arri at the moment.
 
As a PC owner my whole life I recently ran into this issue noticing one by one my PCs were not reading my Arri cards. The solution I had to do in the middle of a shoot cost me $2,800, a new Mac. Pretty much only use it for data dumping so far.

I was able to format it out of UDF which may have solved the issue so it can be read on PC again but I haven’t verified yet. I believe a DIT formatted my cards in his Mac when I had asked him not to and that’s how they got to UDF, so if you keep them from being formatted as UDF, it may still read on a PC, but not entirely sure.
 
Grug said:
Yep, there have been issues with the new M1 macs as well. Definitely important to confirm you have a viable machine on-set for wrangling when shooting on Arri at the moment.
Click to expand...

Didn't know about the M1 Mac issues, either. I was on a shoot earlier in the year and one of the cam's was an Amira and the DIT had a brand new MBP and I don't recall there being any issues. But there are so many variables...

There's a lot to be said for staying behind on updates. I always think about one of the guys in town who updated the OS on the laptop he used for prompting on the morning of a prompter job. Needles to say, the production had to call in another prompter owner/op, because the guy bricked his system, because the software was incompatible with the updated OS.
 
Izod Foldger said:
As a PC owner my whole life I recently ran into this issue noticing one by one my PCs were not reading my Arri cards. The solution I had to do in the middle of a shoot cost me $2,800, a new Mac. Pretty much only use it for data dumping so far.

I was able to format it out of UDF which may have solved the issue so it can be read on PC again but I haven’t verified yet. I believe a DIT formatted my cards in his Mac when I had asked him not to and that’s how they got to UDF, so if you keep them from being formatted as UDF, it may still read on a PC, but not entirely sure.
Click to expand...

How would that work, considering that is the file system that the camera uses? I hate it when DIT's and data wranglers start screwing around with camera cards in their computers. I had a guy several years ago on a big multi-cam shoot screw-up one of my F55 cards. It took several attempted re-formats in-camera to reformat it, including having to pull the battery on the cam, because it locked it up to the point the physical power switch wouldn't power it down.
 
You’re right, Arri uses UDF for the file system. I had incorrectly guessed a Mac DIT had messed up my memory cards by formatting to UDF, but as you said, the camera formats to UDF. I believe Canon uses ExFat. So apparently my problem was just the Windows update.

Anyway, I downloaded Arri footage with my PC recently, so it appears to be working again after the latest Windows update.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top