My First Card Failure and Lost Clip Disaster!

B

bazza

Active member
Horror - I was about 10mins into filming the wedding service yesterday when the camera stopped recording and an error message "check card" was displayed. I immediately replaced the card and continued. On checking the files I find that this last very important clip has not been recorded or at least is not visible in the camera or AVCCAM Viewer. The card was a Transcend 16gb and was about one third full. It was one of three brand new ones, all formatted OK in the camera. The other two recorded no problem.

I presume this must be a card fault, if so it's really unnerving. You can lose a clip so easily and if it's important and long one like this it's a disaster. After nightmares with tapes I was feeling so confident with the solid state system, now I don't trust it.

Has anyone experienced similar? Is there a way to retreive and repair the clip?
 
Something similar happened to me a few months back, a clip stopped and the only way to see it was VLC. I used Toast 10 on a Mac and recover the entire clip!

give it a try!
 
I never use brand new cards.

IE, i always put the camera at a stand at home and record until the brand new card is full > transfer the files to check that everything is ok.

After this test i start to use the new card when doing critical shootings. Yes, it takes time but i think it is worth it.

Bazza, i hope you will be able to recover the clips! :)

/Roger
 
I believe Toast is just for Macs, in which case I'm on PC but maybe there is a similar programme? The clip is not visible at all so wondering if it is a lost cause:(
 
I've never tried VLC but even if it sees it I still need a file to edit (in Edius). A photographer pal says there is softwate to locate and restore lost images on cards so there should be something for this.
 
Exactly. If VLC reads it that means your footage is there. There are loads of free AVCHD converters on the web, mainly targeted towards consumers. A lot of them look a little sketchy to me (possible spyware, horrible user interfaces, huge resulting file sizes, slow) and would make a bad workflow for everyday use, but -- if you need to salvage a clip it's worth trying everything. Every program uses a different algorithm and my experience is professional NLE's can be very picky sometimes. I'd at least try a ton of different programs (install them on an older machine or laptop if you don't want to have loads of software on your main editing rig).
 
It's not looking good - VLC can't see the clip:crybaby: .
Also I've been searching for a recovery tool and tried Data Doctor which came up with a jpeg from each clip it could find, but there wasn't one from the missing clip.
 
I think there should be a hidden file there somewhere, But I'm not sure of the best software to find it on a PC. If you can find it and play it in VLC it might be possible to record the screen and audio (with screen capture software, not by pointing a camera at the screen) and save the resulting file for editing. You might lose some quality, but not too much. Good luck!

I know it's no consolation, but I lost significant clips sometimes with tape, and at least the camera warned you of the problem on the SD card. With tapes sometimes you only found the whole tape was duff when playing it back.
 
I would download the Panasonic AVCCAM viewer for PC there is a also small utility to repair the damaged clips may be it will recover your data.
 
Sympathy to you. Transcend has been a quite reliable brand so far, don't know what happened to you and really can't help you much either, maybe for the ultra most important project, one should use the expensive Panasonic brand? Hmm hmm.
Good luck in recovering those clips.
 
if you go to the control panel of your computer and change the settings to show hidden files and don't see anything extra in there, then this would probably confirm that the camera did not save that clip at all.
 
That sucks, dude. Maybe you should've recovered the data before you switched cards? AFAIK, the corrupted file can only be recovered while the card is still in the camera. After you remove the card, it's gone.
 
Here's to hoping that if the HMC-150A ships with dual slots, they give us the option for redundancy recordings. I know I'd use it in that setting more often than continuous recording.

Another thought - how big is the file you're trying to playback? If it's 0KB than there is absolutely nothing to work with there, but if it's pretty big (hundreds of megs or more) than in theory there should be video in there. Darned if I know how to recover it though.
 
I also had this happen to me at a wedding over the weekend. Unfortunately, the camera recorded over 14 gb of information to a Transcend 16gb card before I got the "Check Card" error message. The card was used on many weddings already this season, and as always, was formatted in the camera before shooting commenced.

I own two HMC150s, and neither camera was able to recognize any files on the card. When I returned to my studio, my Mac Pro rejected the card as unreadable. I was able to recover the files from the card using a software recovery program on my wife's PC, but none of these files is in a recognizable format. The only glimmer of hope of I have in the situation is that there are several large files (1 gb+) that should be my video files. I'm just hoping that I can somehow convert them to a usable format.

I'm upset with myself for putting so much faith in this camera. I have shot many weddings with these cameras this season, and have been thrilled with the footage I have shot using the HMC150. Unfortunately, the fact that the camera let me record over 90 minutes of footage before giving me any sort of error message has shaken my faith in the this camera to the core. I can't trust that this won't happen again, and for somebody like me, who gets only one shot to shoot the events at a wedding, that's enough for me to go back to a tape-based workflow. At least with tape, it was glaringly obvious when something went wrong.

Any help you folks can give on the issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, in advance!
 
Eureka!

Eureka!

After trying several suggested programmes CardRecovery v4.10.1220 has finally found the missing clip #76 as a 10.8.gb file. Only problem CardRecovery saved it as a temporary file with extension .*cr (where * is a sine wave symbol). I saved a version and changed extension to .MTS but VLC says it doesn't recognise the format. Any ideas how I can get it back to the original format please?
 
jmiller I just read your message after posting mine and that's exactly how I feel about the camera. It's kind of comfort that it happened to someone else but devastating news it can happen on a previously good card. Even if we manage to retrieve our files we must get to the bottom of why this happens, is it Transcend or the camera?
 
bazza - I agree, but just to be safe, I'm buying a handful of Panasonic cards today for my shoots this weekend. I'll keep my eyes on this board for any helpful updates, and will be sure to post my own (hopefully successful) resolution. Thanks!
 
Maybe we should use this thread as a way of building up data on card failures. Individual anecdotes don't mean very much statistically, but when we add many anecdotes together it becomes more significant.

For what it's worth I use 5 "Patriot" brand 16gb cards, I've had no problem so far with these.
 
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