GH5 GH5 Issue - Auto Cut Off / Record Stop - Help Graciously Appreciated

A

aprilsnow

Member
....good evening. I apologize in advance if this has been discussed at length prior as I did briefly search but did not find anything recently posted.

Today, while shooting on a GH5 with Panasonic battery grip, the camera stopped recording all of a sudden, and the LCD screen went black momentarily as the stoppage took place. This was after a long 1 plus hour clip with no break. The camera did not turn off. The camera did not give me a memory card error (have seen this before and this was not the case today). I attempted to record again and briefly had recording time before the same thing happened. The red light on the GH5 then began to blink and would not allow me to start recording again at all. I powered down and then back up. At that time the red light again blinked, and there was a faint like click sound internally. I then powered down, took out battery grip, took out battery placed in the body, then powered back up. Checking the footage internally I saw certain files unable to be read, indicating corrupt files more than likely. From then on I used the battery grip and recorded as before, but only for brief moments in order to start and stop files that would not corrupt. Now I have corrupt MDT files of course, some 0KB and some with file size.

So. I am trying to find out a possible reason and solution moving forward to not have this happen again. Of course I also with to try to recover some of the MDT files.

Settings:
4k @ 8bit - 30p (nothing fancy at all)

Memory cards used:
2 x SanDisk 256GB Extreme PRO SDXC - Dual Record Setup
(not new, used many many times on my GH4)

I welcome the expertise of this group, and thank you in advance for your time and reply.
 
It's possible that the long recording time made the camera hot and it had a fault or it had a thermal shutdown. That's just speculation.

Were you shooting indoors or outdoors. Was it a hot day?
 
Aprilsnow,

how often do you do a low level format on the cards either unchecking the quick format box on a PC or using SDFormatter? If you only format in camera (does "quick format" only) or leave the "quick format" box checked when formatting on a PC, all that does is "zero out" the file allocation table on the media card. This allows the camera to reuse areas on the card that still contain image/video data, usually old image/video files are not completely overwritten and "chunks" of data are left to clutter up the media.

Over time this clutter builds up and will begin to affect card reliability resulting in slowdown and ultimately the file corruption you describe. SanDisk will allow you to get away with this longer than most other cards but even SanDisk media will succumb to digital "clutter".

The cure is fairly regular "low level" formatting, if on a PC the Windows format works but if on a Mac you should download and use the program SDFormatter. Program comes in both PC and Mac versions and is very reliable. I do this about every 3 to 5 card uses, and before doing any project I consider important.
 
Thank you both for responding.

Paul, I am wondering the same about possible heat issue. Given I was dual recording to two SanDisk cards, for a long duration, I wonder if the GH5 will overheat. I would not have thought so however given I was only shooting 8bit 4k. I did however afterward take one of the cards out and continue recording after letting the camera body 'rest' for about an hour. Hard to tell if that made a difference because I only did short clips on purpose after the initial malfunction.

Bruce, a very good suggestion. To be honest I do not do a full format often but will start. Something tells me that this would not have happened in my GH4 however, but I could be wrong. My gut is there is something up with either the dual record for long periods, or the battery grip for the GH5 (others have reported weird issues even though Panasonic makes it). I just wish I knew the solution because now I do not trust this camera.

Again, thank you both for the posts and expertise.
 
I recently shot a 2 1/2 program on my gh5 using the second slot as a backup and did not have this issue. I was using an a/c adapter and set to 4k, 24p, 8 bit and recoding to u3 SanDisk cards.
 
Is it possible the battery grip came loose, or was not attached firmly in the first place. The symptoms you describe is similar to removing a battery from the battery grip. The camera will loose power go to a black screen and then resume when it switches over to the internal camera body battery, however if it was recording, the clip will become corrupted. Hoping that Panasonic fixes this in a future firmware update.

Has anyone tried recording a long clip while the battery switches over? (from the battery in the grip to the internal battery) I am assuming the clip will not become corrupted and the power switch over should be seamless?
 
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