How many times are you all going to recycle your SD Cards?

HDCAM is a tape format. Since the tsunami in Japan the price of raw stock skyrocketed. Iam not sure if it has come down any of late.
 
I have a DP friend who never reuses cards from anything serious he's done. SD cards are cheap, and if he ever needs the footage again, he has it. For more expensive media, like SxS or P2, he has a backup of some sort, but for SD cards, he sees no reason to reuse them, especially if production paid for them.
 
edinc90 said:
I have a DP friend who never reuses cards from anything serious he's done. SD cards are cheap, and if he ever needs the footage again, he has it. For more expensive media, like SxS or P2, he has a backup of some sort, but for SD cards, he sees no reason to reuse them, especially if production paid for them.
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+1

If the client is paying for the media, just shoot new cards.
 
edinc90 said:
I have a DP friend who never reuses cards from anything serious he's done. SD cards are cheap, and if he ever needs the footage again, he has it. For more expensive media, like SxS or P2, he has a backup of some sort, but for SD cards, he sees no reason to reuse them, especially if production paid for them.
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Exactly how I've been operating. SD is even cheaper than MiniDV per hour.
 
dregenthal said:
+1

I rarely reformat my cards (just delete the clips). I'm probably missing something but I don't see the benefit to re-formatting.
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Do your research. This is bad practice.

And for the record I fall into the camp of reusing cards, but I have two dozen, & tested each extensively before using them on gigs. Every card fail I've had occurred near the beginning of it's use, not after.
 
So you use a brand new card on a new shoot without testing it under load? That seems just as bad of a practice to me. I'd be running the cards through a rigorous test first so I didn't find out during a shoot, one had a manufacturing defect that didn't pop out at first. Maybe with more expensive cards this isn't an issue, but I can say I've seen variance in certain brands like Transcend between different card performances. Not that my Transcend cards don't work flawlessly for me, I know others who have had issues.

I always test my media before I use it (like hard drives as well).
 
It's been a while since I thought about this, but doesn't flash memory leak, requiring periodic rewrites to keep the data on them fresh?
 
LOL well, it's no different that using an external recorder, a seat belt and an airbag, or a backup parachute :)

'This ought to work for 10 years, buuut just in case...'
 
dregenthal said:
+1

I rarely reformat my cards (just delete the clips). I'm probably missing something but I don't see the benefit to re-formatting.
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You should definitely do some research on this. Re-formatting not only maintains peak card performance, but it also reduces the likelihood of errors. An unformatted card (even when the files have been erased) is kind of like a fragmented hard drive - data just gets shoved into any place it will fit, sequencial or not.
 
deltoidjohn said:
You should definitely do some research on this. Re-formatting not only maintains peak card performance, but it also reduces the likelihood of errors. An unformatted card (even when the files have been erased) is kind of like a fragmented hard drive - data just gets shoved into any place it will fit, sequencial or not.
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I agree every time your hunk of erasing the full card, choose to go with a format instead, your card will be saved. There is some ghosting data that slowly appears and you need to whip your card and registry.
 
deltoidjohn said:
You should definitely do some research on this. Re-formatting not only maintains peak card performance, but it also reduces the likelihood of errors. An unformatted card (even when the files have been erased) is kind of like a fragmented hard drive - data just gets shoved into any place it will fit, sequencial or not.
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Just to be clear . . . I’m not advocating, just reporting my (perhaps limited) experience.
There certainly are a lot of good points in this thread to be considered.
I have a pretty good stock of cards so I’m not “putting all my eggs in one basket” so to speak, and I am one of those people that don’t wait until the end of the day to play back select clips to confirm that things are proceeding as one might expect.

Perhaps it's my thought process that’s flawed?
My experience is that things always work properly right up until right before they fail.

Formatting might give better odds than deleting clips, then again it might not. I did not realize that formatting the card guaranteed the files would be written in contiguous spaces.
It's clear to me that formatting confirms the directory structure, without which my data could be corrupted as well.

I'm not entirely ready to cheap out on media but I'd like to understand what makes one 64GB SDXC card worth $90 and another one $350?

Most of all I am interested in hearing from anyone that has experienced a record or playback error (which is not directly attributable to operator error or mishandling the media).
 
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