Suggestions for SD Card file recovery? And should I be using better cards?

J

Jeff Kirkland

Member
Hi All,

So my first FS100 shoot, a simple presentation to an audience, looks great but the SD card seems to be corrupt. Not a good start. Not being a complete idiot, I had an Atomos Ninja recording as well so I don't need to panic but I'm more than a little concerned that I have a corrupted card the first job I used the camera on.

So, first question: I may not always have a Ninja connected so are there any suggestions for rescuing the broken clip from the card? It's a one hour clip and from what I can see, it's composed of five .MTS files and the second one has corrupted. It's 2.1gb on the card but only 1.5gb will copy over. I can use ClipWrap to copy over as much as I can get but I'm hoping that there might be some sort of blind copy app that would ignore the error and maybe give me some more of the missing part of the clip.


And second, and probably most important, should I be using better cards? I used a 16gb SanDisk Ultra Class 10 card. I've never had a problem with SanDisk on other cameras and, on paper at least, the Ultras seem more than enough for plain vanilla recording. Is there something I don't know about them? Should I be looking at SanDisk Extremes or beyond? They seem overkill for AVCHD at that bitrate...

...or should I just write it off as one of those things and be glad I had a backup? Are the days when you could go out with a camera and trust it to record what you point it at over?

Cheers
Jeff K
 
i havent had a card fail on me yet (i use transcend) but this is why I bought the FMU128 as backup. it doesnt record slowmo though but for the majority of my work, it gives me peace of mind
 
I have a bunch of different brands. Sandisc Extreme, Transcend, Extrememory andwhatnot all class 10
I had a problem once with a card that was already dead on arrival, but never corrupted files.

Frank
 
Sandisks should be fine. They are really good. I did have 2 Kingston's before, and they both failed on me over time. I started getting buffer more and more buffer errors as time went on.

Sandisk, no problems except one which was broken on arrival, which they replaced.
 
What made this one worse was that this was a re-shoot due to a corrupt card at a previous event when I didn't have a spare Ninja to bring with me. Same person, completely different card, different camera, same issue - twice in a row. What are the chances?

Thanks for the replies. Here in Australia the SanDisK Extremes are about $40 each but cost isn't really an issue, I just went with what looked to fit the specification and was available at my local store. Thanks for the Amazon link. A bunch of Extremes are on their way.

So to follow on - is there a good way to test a card before I use it on a shoot? Even for the best rated of them, I don't have a lot of faith in quality control when they're churning out millions on a production line. I'd rest much easier if I could do some sort of reliability test.

Cheers
Jeff K
 
I have never been a fan of Sony memory sticks, but recently I have gotten the impression that they may be more reliable than SD cards, and faster (????). And they one have coming out where a single card will record two copies of everything (have no knowledge on comptability with existing cams).
 
@joy new media: The 16gb SanDisk Extreme cards are about $40 here in Australia but getting the Ultras was more about what was available at the local store than any cost saving exercise. Thanks for the link. I have a some cards on the way.

@Dermot: The HDSpeed app looks like the sort of thing I was after. I'm on a Mac too so an OS X equivalent would be nice but it seems to run ok on a Windows 7 virtual machine under Parallels. I guess if I do a write/read/verify of each card every so often I stand a better chance of catching a faulty card before I use it.

Cheers
Jeff K
 
I had one sandisk card corrupt, was able to recover some of the footage.

Mean to buy an FMU when I decide how commited I am to the camera.

(and shoot dual)

S
 
Jeff Kirkland said:
@joy new media: The 16gb SanDisk Extreme cards are about $40 here in Australia but getting the Ultras was more about what was available at the local store than any cost saving exercise. Thanks for the link. I have a some cards on the way.
Click to expand...

No problemo, like Sam I'm thinking about the FMU just for backup, but so far everything has been fine. I'm always paranoid about loosing footage from a crucial shoot, but so far its never happened ... knock on wood.
 
I was able to untangle my footage, sort of got broken up into chunks and got in the wrong order (after recovery) and some dropped frames

took till 3am

S
 
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