FS7: FS7M2 - Sony 128GB G series XQD card fail

[mrmo]

Screen shot pretty small - couldn't read Catalyst details...
Sounds to me like a faulty XQD card. Experienced one on a shoot about a year ago...Producer's camera & card (not a new card - he had been using it for a couple of months with no problems... On that day - An operator had gone out to shoot b-roll - then camera came back and was being used for 2nd cam on an interview. As I recall, camera stopped rolling by itself during interview. Went to xfer and Shots didn't show up properly on a Mac / when we put card back in camera some (but not all) of thumbnails showed up and played -- Set card aside (we were in middle of multi-cam shoot). Did quick camera check, and camera seemed fine... Everything else shot with that camera (obviously onto other cards) later in day was fine. Next day nothing showed up as readable on card. Bad card sent in to have sony attempt to recover data - unsuccessful. Producer was sent new replaceement card...

Sorry I don't know how. It is default by uploading in forum.

 

[Vintegreo]

Your method of dealing with the memory cards is extremely risky, in my opinion. Others have already stated it here, but using the Mac Finder or PC drag and drop is not a good idea.

In order to successfully and safely copy your media from the card to another location, it's vital that you not do any damage along the way to the metadata. Sure, you might get lucky and still be able to play back your stuff, but who wants to take that risk?

I must admit, I break out in a cold sweat when I'm on a shoot and have to backup media, reformat cards, etc prior to getting the footage backed up to my primary edit system.

With that in mind, I carry two portable hard drives and use Hedge for Mac to do the transfers. That way if there's any problem with one of the drives I copied to, I still have another copy. Additionally, as others have said, Hedge does the checksum verification to make sure it got all the bits of data so that you can actually read the stuff when you need to.

Someone more informed than me could tell you whether dragging and dropping within the finder could have damaged the card or it's data. I'm not sure, but what if you did a command-X instead of a command-C when you did the copy paste? Not sure if that's even possible, but I wonder.

Bottom line, though, so sorry that this happened to you! I hope that in addition to learning whether or not this was a card problem that you can also find a very safe and reliable workflow. The fact is, that even if this card is messed up through no fault of your own, that you should come up with a better workflow regardless. It will save you much stress.