Control Data Error

M

MIDIMan

Member
I had my first card failure at a dance recital last night. The camera is my second HMC and is 3 months old. The card is a 2-week old 32GB Transcend Class 6 made in Taiwan. I had tested it in the studio by recording the entire card a couple of times and dropping the footage into FCP, but it failed on the first production use. At the end of the final number, I stopped the camera, then hit record again when the curtain call started. The message "Control data error has been detected. Repairing" appeared on the screen, and after a minute, it came back with a message saying "Repair successful". When I got the card home, it mounted to the desktop, but Log and Transfer would not recognize it.

After copying the contents to the hard drive, I downloaded ACVVAM_Restore, which reported that it had successfully repaired the card. I was able to transcode all but 2 clips. I can see the missing clips in the Stream folder. They are 4 GB each, running 25 minutes a piece.

I tried using Handbrake to transcode the files, but the resulting MP4 file hangs in Quicktime, and FCP won't recognize it. I downloaded VLC, which plays back the 2 files perfectly, but won't convert them to anything useable in FCP. I then downloaded the trial version of Voltaic which successfully transcoded the first 10 seconds of both clips to the AIC codec. After purchasing the activation code, the application fails to transcode the entire clip. The preview window in Voltaic is also locked, and won't allow me to set a shorter region to transcode.

Is anyone familiar with this error, and do you have any suggestions for pulling these 2 clips? I'd welcome any suggestions as to how I can salvage a bad situation. Many thanks!
 
I had a problem similar to this. I used Toast to transcode the MTS files to .mov files which you can import to FCP.
 
jungleham said:
I had a problem similar to this. I used Toast to transcode the MTS files to .mov files which you can import to FCP.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I found Aimersoft Total Media Converter, which was able to rescue the files. Transcend replaced the defective card, but sent me another Taiwan-manufactured card. I'm crossing my fingers that the new one won't fail.
 
I've read a lot about sdhc card "failures" and there are two things I've never seen mentioned:

1) Camera firmware. Make sure you are running the latest firmware. My HMC150 is about 3 weeks old and the firmware is 1.21, but Panasonic still lists 1.20 as the latest firmware on their site (https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/support/cs/csregistp2m/ep2main/soft/upghmc150_e.htm). You may want to contact them and see what's up.

2) To be honest, I don't think anything will truly fix this, and this is why: The camera formats the cards using the FAT32 file system and the maximum size of any single file under the FAT32 file system is 4GB. This is not a limitation of the camera or the SDHC card, but of the file system. In order to go over this limit, the camera would have to use NTFS or one of the linux file systems, which is does not use. Now, what the camera SHOULD do is start a new file when it detects that the current file is 4GB and continue recording to the new file. The fact that it is screwing up and erroring out MAY indicate an issue with the firmware, which is why I would suggest upgrading it.

I think I'm going to test this on my camera and record for 30 minutes and see what happens...I'll post the results.

There was most likely nothing wrong with your card.....4GB of storage is roughly 24 minutes or so of constant recording so, if the card was unable to start a new file, this is where it would error out. Again, this is a limitation of the file system and not the card.

To summarize:

-make sure you're running firmware 1.20 and ask panasonic where 1.21 can be download
-do not record for more than 25 minutes at a time.

My guess is your issues will go away.
 
Just to confirm, I was able to record over 30 minutes of footage non stop. The file ended at exactly 4GB in size and a new one was started without issue. Firmware 1.21.
 
How did u guys got that 1.21 firmware?! and are there any informations about the changes to 1.20 ?
 
So this thread is WAAAAAY old, but I just had this issue for the first time ever today so I figured I'd share in case people have this issue in the future.

I use the good/expensive Panasonic Gold cards and have never had issues in 3 years of heavy shooting with any of my cards on my HMC150. It has nothing to do with the length of recording/file size as I've shot 1.5 hour clips for years with no issues. The camera did automatically "repair" the issue in just a few seconds once I took off the write protection on the card, and then all was well and all the clips were there as usual.

Interestingly, before it repaired, I copied the un-repaired SDHC card to my desktop. I then repaired it and copied it again. The two resulting file sizes of the PRIVATE folder were slightly different. I compared the pre-repaired SDHC card to the repaired one and all files were the same except the INDEX.BDM file. The pre-repaired card with the CONTROL DATA ERROR had that file but it was at Zero KB...whereas the repaired card had it as "4 KB on card (582 bytes)". That is obviously the file that needs to be repaired by the camera (again, taking OFF write protection first). Just for fun, I replaced the copied Zero KB INDEX.BDM file with a totally different INDEX.BDM file from a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SDHC card and it still seemed to fix it as the files appeared in my NLE just fine. If I put that same card back into my camera with a different card's INDEX.BDM file, the error pops up again and the card is instantly repaired by the camera. Not really sure what that file is but in the end, all I really care about is that the files weren't lost and the footage was recovered just fine.

Just to be safe, I probably won't use that card again for anything important even though its expensive and might just be fine now.
 
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