C100: C100 footage glitches

Saddler

Well-known member
I have an r1 C100. In the past I had notices that I was starting to get some glitches showing up in my footage. The frame gets filled with vertically long rectangles, and the image either jumps back and forth in z-axis, or side to side (almost like it's jumping back and forth between the current image and footage from a second or two back). The whole glitch lasts about half a second, and then things go back to normal.

Previously I had been using my Ninja 2 for all run and gun, but on my recent shoot I just used the SD cards (Sandisk Extreme 64GB SDXC - 60MB/s). So I had though initially that the glitches were caused from the HDMI cable getting bumped going out to the Ninja, but now I know that's not the case. In 2-2.5 hours of filming, I counted 16 glitches.

Has anyone encountered this before? My firmware is revision 1.0.3.1.00

EDIT: I haven't noticed these glitches when filming for up to 4 hours on stix, just when doing run-n-gun.
 
I've only ever seen it happen twice but only on SD cards myself. I actually starting running the Ninja Star partly as a result and haven't seen the issue since. I was always told it was just a card buffer issue but if you're experiencing it on your Ninja that may not be the case.
 
Well, perhaps it's 2 different issues creating a similar result. When I initially started shooting run-n-gun w/ the Ninja, I think I was using a mechanical drive before I upgraded to SSDs.

I have my SDXC card formatted to ExFAT ... could that potentially be causing card buffer issues?
 
Hmm, I've always recorded to the SD cards even when using the Ninja so I have backup. Does anyone know, if your SD card glitches due to a card buffer issue, does that also effect the signal going out through the HDMI?

TSDavis, are you recording to the SD cards when you use the Ninja Star, or just the Star?
 
Oh I always record to the SD Cards on top of the star and in addition to that I have the cards running as duplicates. Have you tried formatting your cards in camera as opposed to via your computer?
 
It might be the drive you're copying the cards to. I recently started seeing glitches too, and couldn't figure out if it was the SD card, the C100 overheating, the Ninja, maybe my computer graphics card, the transcoding process....

Turns out the batch of WD Passport drives I was copying to had defects - not in the drives themselves, but in the USB controllers. Copying through Mac's Finder couldn't detect any issues - the only way is using Shotput Pro or another checksum app.

If you're playing footage straight off the card, VLC or even the AVCHD preview program will often have difficulty playing the stream, so you'll see the same glitches but that's just a playback problem and not in the data itself.
 
I have had similar issues in the past and I solved my issues by always formatting cards using the official SDFormatter tool: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

I never format within Windows and only format in-camera if I don't have time or a PC handy.

If you continually format cards using an OS formatter, you run the risk of things going wrong. The SD association actually discourages people from using OS formatters.
 
analog_addict Thanks for this info, I had no idea that SD cards shouldn't be formatted by OS utilities. I'll try this out and see how it works.
 
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