Incompatible Cards - 400 Intra

O

OnSet

Well-known member
Upgraded EVA1 firmware yesterday to 2.02 and today started to look at the 400 Intra.

Some cards (older design without a 'V' designation on them) give an "Incompatible Card in Slot #" warning message, both when first inserted, and when recording begins.

The cards I have that give the warning are Sony G series and Toshiba Exceria Pro series.

I don't get a warning from either Angelbird (V90) or from Delkin (V60) cards.

Interestingly enough, the G series and Exceria Pro series both seem to record fine at 400I - though in addition to at initial insertion, the warning comes up each time recording begins.

I also switched the settings to dual record two cards simultaneously, which worked fine even when I mixed a "V" card with a 'non-V' card in the two slots.

At least theoretically both the Sony and Toshiba cards should be capable of faster recording speeds than the Delkin cards.

I'm guessing that the camera is either looking for a designation that it can read from the card? / or it has a reference table of cards that should be compatible.

Haven't recorded too much yet, with longest test record being ~15 minutes, but no issues yet with any of the above cards at 400I.

Would like to hear results from others..?
 
I haven't tried any non supported cards on ALL-I 400, only the supported Angelbirds which work fine. All my other cards (IIRC) still work fine in the lower Mbps bodes like LongGop 150 etc.

It's not just about the max speed a card supports, its about the MINIMUM write speed a card reports, which is what sets apart the newer v60/v90 cards. Yes the camera may block you from using unsupported cards I suspect. But this is a good thing. I'm sure some unsupported cards could handle the load for a while, and then dip (because they don't have a *minimum* write speed) and crash/corrupt everything.
 
It's behaving exactly like it should.

The camera requires V60 cards. Your V60 and V90 cards are working properly without giving the warning. That's what they should do.

Your other cards don't have the V60 rating, so they're producing the warning. Whether they're technically fast enough or not, maybe they are, maybe they'll work, but they're not RATED. They're not guaranteed. They may work, they may fail. The camera doesn't prevent you from using them, but it does warn you that you're using an incompatible card, so if it fails to record, that's on you. It'll still try.

V60 is a minimum guaranteed continuous write speed rating. The camera can sense what V-speed rating the card is. If it's not V60-rated, you'll always get that warning.
 
To me this is a no-brainer, if you want to record all-intra use a card that is rated.
Why would you want to run the risk of getting a failure during an important recording by using an unrated card?
 
Cary Knoop said:
To me this is a no-brainer, if you want to record all-intra use a card that is rated.
Why would you want to run the risk of getting a failure during an important recording by using an unrated card?
Click to expand...

While I'm sure I wouldn't rely on a non-rated card for primary record, the dual simultaneous record function (which I like using) and the fact that so far I have only about 500 GB of v90 or v60 cards as opposed to another 750GB of 'fast' unrated cards make me want to better understand whether they would be at all useful as backups... (I guess I really wish I could record at 400 in one slot and 150 in the other as an optioon, but I doubt the processing in the camera could accomplish that...) From reading about the error messages in the manual, it seems that it's possible to have a write error on one card during recording without the other one being effected. And of course at this point it's all just playing and testing...

So if anyone else is running the same sorts of test, I'd love to hear from them as well, just to gain greater insight into the process.

Personally (so far) I've been very happy with the 150mbps long-gop recording quality and haven't noticed a major IQ improvement in going to 400I. But much of my work is client-request-driven, and I want to be ready should they request 400I. With that said, I'm not looking to buy any more 'unrated' cards, or anything less than v90, but at only about 40 minutes per 128GB card and typically wanting to have at least 6 hours of media available for each shoot day (9 x 128GB cards at 400I), at current prices it would be great to hold off a bit on a dual set of v90 cards for second-slot backups.

So one thing I'm particularly interested in discovering is exactly how the camera determines the 'Incompatible' warning?
 
It determines it by querying the card and asking what data rates it supports, and then comparing it to what the camera requires. If the card doesn't have a good enough answer, the camera says "incompatible."

You don't need V90 cards, by the way. You need V60. Some folks don't make V60 (Panasonic included) so by default you would have to get a V90 if you wanted a Panasonic card, but if you can find V60 cards, those are 100% compatible with 400All-I.
 
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