GH4 Transend 128GB Class 3 card & & insufficient card write speed

[Jimmy Pierce]

I've had a GH4 for about 2 years now, and have used THIS card the entire time, for 4K & 1080p video. I've shot hours and hours of footage over that time and never had any write speed issues. Recently the camera has started to show the message "recording stopped due to insufficient card write speed", after recording for a few minutes, both in 4K 100mbps MOV & 1080P 100mbps MOV settings. I'm going to get a new card anyway but am just wondering why all of a sudden the card no longer has sufficient write speeds. Has the card gone bad?

Anyone had this issue with other cards?

 

[Jaime Valles]

That happened to me as well. Cards go bad. You may want to do a deep level format of the card using a program like SDFormatter to see if that helps.

 

[Bruce Foreman]

The Panasonic cameras do not offer a low (deep) level format option, only the quick format which does nothing but zero out the first 2 or 3 characters of the filenames in the File Allocation Table. The files no longer show on the camera and the sectors occupied by the files may now be re-used. At this point file recovery software may still recover your images (like if you accidentally reformatted the card in camera).

What happens is that image and video files re-using these sectors may not completely overwrite previous file data and over time this leaves a lot of file fragment "clutter" that can dramatically slow down writes to the media. The "cure" is frequent low level formatting (which the GH4 cannot do), I do this about every 3 to 5 uses of my cards. If using a PC the format command has a "quick format" box which is checked by default, unchecking it will cause the format to be "low level" where everything on the card is "zeroed out".

The free program SDFORMATTER is very highly recommended for this, if you use a MAC then DEFINITELY use this program. Some MAC users have reported using the MAC format function has rendered the card unreadable by the camera.

Card brand: Transcend is about the best of the "bargain brand" cards but I have seen enough problem reports with them that there is no way I would trust my work to them. Many like them and swear by them but the QC that goes into SanDisk products is not "there" in bargain brands. So I suggest your new card should be SanDisk and save your receipt or invoice, SanDisk has a lifetime warranty.