My First Card Failure and Lost Clip Disaster!

%$^@#$@

1 of the patriots is no longer readable by the camera and FCP.... Shot 6 cards that day and figures something is going to be difficult.

Thank god the data is all there and i see the stream file... Any way to get the folder structure corrected... or have we been there all ready...? How the hell does it get corrupted? One thing unique is I took footage one HMC and then tried to play it back on another? That has worked before...
 
oh yyow madhmc...you are in the Orlando area...you u know whats an average cost of labour to have a pc built if i provide the parts?
 
Had my first card errors today in the HMC40. Was using a Patriot 16GB class 6. Formatted card in camera first, then got an error. Went to playback mode and it repaired the clip. Then got another error and would no longer record to the card or view in playback mode. Put a Transcend in and went on with the day. Bums me out as I just ordered another Patriot card.
 
MadHMC150 said:
Yep.. they were the card to have. In our previous card posts we talked about how there are many different versions of the same card. I guess they put out a bad batch. I will be using the Panny and Delkin Devices cards more now :)
Click to expand...


I have had Delkin cards fail on me twice, most recenlty, yesterday: "error" message and then, "correcting error," and then "no data."
 
3 of my 4 Transcend 16g cards failed, seemingly all at the same time. Makes me wonder if its the internal card reader. My Patriot Class 4 32g card seems to work fine still.
 
Contacted Delkin today and I was shocked by how accomodating they were (unheard of in the world of customer no service). Promised me a new Delkin card (they told me their new cards now have a new configuration, so I should not have problems in the future) and said any files they can retrieve from my problem card will be burned to disk.
 
I've had three Kingston 8GB class 6 cards fail over the last two weekends. First one, "check card" after shooting 25 minutes of footage. Other two cards, "check card" after re-inserting them into the camera. All three won't mount via my Mac or PC.
My camera is brand new from B&H. Firmware 1.21. Could it be the camera?
 
I doubt it's the camera. I bought my HMC150 from B&H in June, and also bought a 16GB Kingston class 6 card - it was not included in the recommended list for the camera, but I assumed any class 6 card ought to do the trick.

The card failed about 10 minutes into recording at PA1080 60i. I called up B&H and got a replacement card - it also failed about 10 minute into recording. Mind you, I formatted the card in camera before shooting both times.

The faulty card

I called up B&H again, and the customer service rep put me into a 3 way call with an agent familiar with the camera. The agent chuckled and said what I had was a "Kingston no-class" card - basically the Kingston cards were manufactured in such a way that they are no optimized for AVCHD recording, so something internal broke both times. He recommended going with a Panasonic or Sandisk instead - so I bought another Sandisk and have had no issues yet.
 
Thanks Neighborhood Studios. What you say makes sense to me. It seems this whole situation was due to my choosing Kingston. Double my bad for buying at Frys. 15 day return policy no exceptions which ran out today... but my cards are in the midst of data recovery.
We should get the word out to stay away from Kingston for our purposes here.
 
You're welcome...sorry to hear about the bad luck, but it's a learning experience I suppose. Best of luck in getting that data back, my computer wouldn't even read my Kingstons after they fried.
 
Yes my bad Kingston's won't mount either. May be sending them to data recovery: Drivesavers in NoCal $590 each, which is actually a great price. That depends on what my boss and the client decide. Okay enough of the sob story here's the good stuff...
I emailed Panasonic to get the definitive manufacturer's list of proper SDHC cards for the HMC, and here it is:
Dear customer,

Thank you very much for supporting Panasonic professional AV products.

We recommend only Panasonic SD or SDHC card with Class 4 or higher.
Below is the Panasonic model number which is bigger than 4GB size.

4GB
RP-SDV04G
RP-SDM04G
RP-SDW04G
RP-SDP04G

6GB
RP-SDM06G

8GB
RP-SDV08G
RP-SDM08G
RP-SDW08G
RP-SDP08G

12GB
RP-SDM12G
RP-SDP12G

16GB
RP-SDV16G
RP-SDM16G
RP-SDW16G
RP-SDP16G

32GB
RP-SDV32G
RP-SDW32G
RP-SDP32G

Best Regards,
--------------------------------------------
PASS Support Team
sav.p2support.pavc@ml.jp.panasonic.com
 
It is normal that Panasonic will only recommend their own card.

In my case, I use only Panasoncic Gold and Sandisk Extreme cards.
 
Add Delkin. I have had two card failures with them in four shoots. I was only using them because they came with the camera. No issues with Panasonic yet.
 
I had 2 Kingston class 6 8 gig card failures today on 2 different cameras. There is definitely a bad batch out their. Playback was checked in both cameras numerous times and they were formatted in the camera. Some of the footage was even dumped to a mac laptop but by the end of the day both cards were unreadable by mac, pc, or camera. Before today Kingston had been very reliable and I've probably shot over 300 cards without a problem.
 
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.
Click to expand...
Hope this thread isn't too stale, but this brings up an important question.

Everywhere I read about the importance of using a high-quality card, watch out for counterfeits, etc., but I also read, and understand from my knowledge about memory devices generally, that even a reputable manufacturer's card can get an occasional "bad spot" in it. If the device sees if first and avoids it, great, and if not, you loose some or all of your file.

My question: Would you say that almost all of the file corruption problems associated with AVCHD can be blamed on bad cards or bad sectors of cards?

Follow up question: If you do what you say above, and discover a bad sector in your brand new SDHC card, is it returnable based on that? Or is it salvageable in some way?
 
Okay, I posted prematurely, not having noticed how long this thread actually was. (Still getting used to this forum.)

It seems that most people agree that the card is the prime suspect in failures, and the one camera malfunction seemed to be fairly obvious in a short time.

And I see people sending their cards back all the time, sometimes even getting free file recovery from the manufacturer (gotta try that first!).

Still, this seems to be a fairly large number of anecdotes, too many to brush off as incidental. The benefit of a tape recording is that it is robust. Power failure? It just stops. Start it up again. Tape jam? One looses that shot's continuity, but at least you always know within a very short time. And even the worst tape failure still allows one to recover the footage immediately prior to the event.

Potentially loosing hours of footage, either one continuous long shot or all the shots on a card, does not fill one with confidence about the AVCHD format. I'm going to have to consider this purchase very carefully.

My contribution: I once read that SD cards do not record their data sequentially, but randomly on whatever available space is on the card. I don't know if that is technically true, or if SDHC cards are different, but could that be contributing to this problem? An inherently unstable recording format?
 
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