VaricamLT: "Clips Unrepairable" after someone color tagged card on Mac.

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Straw Man

Active member
I wanted to share an an experience I had on Friday where the p2 card became unreadable in camera. Shooting a short promo for a musician in his studio. They were happy with the takes we had so far and wanted to get the footage offloaded immediately so they could upload to an editor in LA that needed to turn it around same day. It was his studio Mac so he was driving, I plugged in the card for him, he opened it up in finder and I direct him to the AVCLIP folder, he opens the folder, highlights them all, then tags them "green," and THEN copies them onto his Mac. I thought "hmmm I hope that was an okay thing to do..." I had him remove the color tags before he ejected the card. They wanted to shoot one more short thing, so I put card back in the LT and since I was a little worried by his color tagging the files on the camera card, I went to PLAY the earlier takes just to make sure. Well my worry was well-founded as all the clips were showing red and "Clip Unrepairable." So I roll the camera for a few seconds and wave my hand in front of lens. Navigate back to play and the new clip I just filmed is also "Clip Unrepairable." So no clips are viewable, but the camera does appear to be recording new clips and is able to write to card.

To make things scarier, his studio Mac is restricted to Pro Tools only (which is understandable) and he doesn't and won't download or install anything else, so there was nothing on his system to playback the files we had copied over to confirm everything was okay. We had to wait about 20 min for a clip to finish uploading and his LA editor was able to throw in Premiere and confirm the footage was totally fine, whew. But it was a terrifying 20 min where I thought I might be telling them we needed to reshoot the whole thing. When I got back to my setup at home, I of course confirmed all the files were good, and also that the test clip I shot after the card was unreadable, waving my hand in front of lens, was also there and totally fine! It just was not able to be played back in camera.

Obviously if it's me, I'm copying the whole card's original file structure onto my drives, and I'm certainly not color tagging raw files on the card itself or messing with the original card in any way whatsoever. But I did want to share in case it saves anyone else some worry in the future. And just because I'm curious, any ideas about what might have happened? I assume tagging the clips green attached some small amount of metadata that the LT had no idea what to do with so it just rendered them all unplayable. Even after removing the tags the damage was done. Interesting though that it was still able to record new clips totally fine, yet those new clips which hadn't been labeled were also unreadable in camera. Played back totally fine on the computer later though.
 
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Thanks for sharing your harrowing story. It just goes to reinforce my perpetual, adamant advice: the very first thing you should always do, ALWAYS, is write-protect the card the second you take it out of the camera. Always. That would prevent situations like this from ever arising in the first place.
 
Straw Man said:
I assume tagging the clips green attached some small amount of metadata that the LT had no idea what to do with so it just rendered them all unplayable.
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This was my assumption too. It makes perfect sense that the clip integrity wasn't compromised on a computer, and it also makes sense to me how the camera saw something unexpected in the card data that froze it off. The only part I am surprised by is that it kept recording new clips to the card.

But in general, yeah, don't ever write anything to your camera card from an exterior source.
 
Straw Man said:
And just because I'm curious, any ideas about what might have happened? I assume tagging the clips green attached some small amount of metadata that the LT had no idea what to do with so it just rendered them all unplayable.
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I too assume something like this definitely happened and I imagine it's a quirk with the highly complex Panasonic P2 card system/data.

I say that because I have been color tagging footage just like that editor for the past 4-5 years on either SSDs or CFast cards from Blackmagic cameras or external recorders (Atomos), and it has never failed me once.

However, these were always ProRes files (.mov) so I imagine my workflow is much less prone to any issues because of the native and simpler Apple file format.
 
NEVER EVER allow anyone to do anything to a P2 card connected to a computer. Safest way to handle them is copy the main folder and the "last clip" file and paste to the destination drive(if copying the whole card). And ONLY view clips with the Panasonic P2 viewer software of dedicated editing software. NEVER try to view video clips individually from within one of the folders. The file structure is just too easy to damage. God help you if you corrupt/mess-up the "Last Clip" file. You might as well forget all of the footage that was on the card.

Also, Mac's write junk files to cards/drives when you connect them and that can screw things up. I ended up DL'ing Clean My Drive 2 that automatically scans and removes the junk files from cards and drives before it ejects them from my RMBP.
 
Yes agreed. As I said I would never do such a thing myself, it was because someone else was at the keyboard and it takes about 1 second to tag something, quicker than I can react standing a few feet behind him. I will definitely have the card write-protected as soon as it comes out of camera from now on. P2 viewer plus was not an option in this case because as I said, his Mac had Pro Tools and an OS on it and was not going to be installing any other software.

I did some more research today and the verbiage from Panasonic that I think best describes this situation (referring to card's file structure): "If any of the above information is changed or deleted, it cannot be recognized as P2 Data or may disable use in p2 products." I think that succinctly explains why the footage itself was totally fine and uncorrupted, but the Varicam LT system could no longer talk to it correctly. The mxf files don't have to be in the original file structure in order to work in FCPX or premiere, for example, but to be recognized in a p2 system they obviously do. And that little bit of color labeling metadata, while not visibly adding to or removing from the file structure, did something to break it.

I'm going to be bringing my own laptop on every job as a precaution from now on, so that I don't run into another situation where someone's system is totally incapable of viewing mxf files.
 
My policy is not to hand camera-original cards to clients; too many complex file structures that are too easy to mess up (as you unfortunately found). I either hand over a hard drive or SSD, upload/transfer the files to the cloud/FTP/dropbox/etc, or maybe copy stuff from my drives onto cards that are functioning as basically tiny SSDs (so there's not a complex folder, just .wav, .mov, or similar files). If they want cards, I make it clear that it's really easy to accidentally damage the files, they're responsible, etc.

And I moved to this process only after seeing things fall apart.

So if I'm reading right, you were eventually able to make your camera files usable? I sure hope so!
 
One related note of caution - related to SD cards.
I was recently on a shoot with the EVA1 and the producer wanted to transfer the sd cards with his relatively new MBP - the one with the newer connectors and no SD card slot. We also didn't have cables to go from my older USB3 to his hard drive -- so we were stuck with his computer and card reader.
Jump forward a days to me setting up the cards to make an additional back up with my PC. All the cards had the MAC 'junk' files on them! (In spite of the fact that they had all been write protected as soon as they were removed from the camera.)

Apparently the 'write protect' function on an SD card is based on the reader recognizing the position of the switch -- he had a cheap reader that didn't 'see' the switch -- hence the Mac's ability to write the junk files.

So just because I was 'write protected' did not mean being write protected!
 
Jim Feeley said:
So if I'm reading right, you were eventually able to make your camera files usable? I sure hope so!
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Yes Jim, files were totally fine! Just an issue with the camera being able to talk to the card. It was even able to record new clips which were 100% good, but I couldn't play those back on the camera either. Of course once I formatted everything is back to normal.
 
FREAKY!

And this is why I always write protect cards before handing them over.


OnSet said:
One related note of caution - related to SD cards.
I was recently on a shoot with the EVA1 and the producer wanted to transfer the sd cards with his relatively new MBP - the one with the newer connectors and no SD card slot. We also didn't have cables to go from my older USB3 to his hard drive -- so we were stuck with his computer and card reader.
Jump forward a days to me setting up the cards to make an additional back up with my PC. All the cards had the MAC 'junk' files on them! (In spite of the fact that they had all been write protected as soon as they were removed from the camera.)

Apparently the 'write protect' function on an SD card is based on the reader recognizing the position of the switch -- he had a cheap reader that didn't 'see' the switch -- hence the Mac's ability to write the junk files.

So just because I was 'write protected' did not mean being write protected!
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Yikes! Well that is no good....
 
I did immediately inform the producer, who promised to replace the reader.
But the really disturbing part is that, since the 'junk' files don't normally display in Finder on the MAC, it was only by taking the cards to a PC without MacDrive that I saw the files and determined that there was a problem.
 
MacPaw software is very good...I have been using 'CleanMyMac' for years.

It's on its third version now and they update it constantly.
 
Macs infamously stick stuff onto your media whenever the computer mounts them. I always suggest that the first thing that should be done with any camera original media is to DOWNLOAD the thing in its entirety. If someone wants to look at a file they can do so from the copy. Anything else is risking your master content.
 
Clean My Mac is a great investment - amazing how much junk it cleans out!! First time its used it pulls about 10GB of garbage off your drive! And then approx 2-3 GB every fortnight.
 
Mitch Gross said:
Macs infamously stick stuff onto your media whenever the computer mounts them. I always suggest that the first thing that should be done with any camera original media is to DOWNLOAD the thing in its entirety. If someone wants to look at a file they can do so from the copy. Anything else is risking your master content.
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Good advice that should be followed regardless, but you can stop Macs from writing these files through the command line: (1) open Terminal, (2) copy and paste the following, then hit enter: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true (3) reboot the Mac.

The Mac won't write these files after the reboot. Google "stop Mac creating .DS_Store Files" or something similar for articles/instructions on this.
 
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