GH4 U3 Cards

Been using the Transcend 64gb version and it's worked flawlessly at all resolutions and bit rates. Only thing I haven't tried is long clips. Most of my captures have been 1-3 minutes at the most.
 
Lots of shooting with 64GB Transcend U3 card and there have been zero issues. Average write speed of 60+MB/s is well above the 25MB/s necessary for the GH4's 200mbps modes. I'm also very happy with the read speed. File offloading is much faster. Here's a blog post of my speed tests for more information if you're interested.
 
I shot 25 minutes of a speech spanned across several files on a SanDisk Extreme Pro 64GB U1 card at 4k/30p. No issues.
 
Shot five 90-100 minute long 4k doc interviews with the Transcends and Kingstons this week. Yes, the GH4 does break up all of the clips into bridged 4.27 GB clips. No problems at all with the Transcends, big problems with the Kingstons. Almost lost an important interview with a political figure who flew all of the way from Washington DC to LA to shoot this, Kingston card wouldn't read in my MBP, then was crashing the computer in the middle of the file transfer. Got home and tested it in my 2013 iMac, iMac won't even recognize the card, it wants to erase it, won't even mount it. It is also like the card thickness on the Kingston is too thick, it barely inserts all of the way into the MBP or the iMac. As far as I am concerned, the Kingstons are crap, I am selling all of mine immediately, just ordered half a dozen more of the Transcends to replace them.
 
I've been using the Transcend 128GB U3 cards with my GH4 with zero issues shooting at Cinema 4K at 100Mbps. Haven't tried 200Mbps HD, but I suspect it should be fine if 4K works well.
 
I just want to to report that the Transend 128 GB card I linked to in the first post does NOT work with GH2 Moon Trial 7, recording at 150 Mb/s. Not even in 24L mode, recording at 50 Mb/s. Recording stops within mere seconds.

I've very surprised (and confused) how anyone has this card working with the GH4.
 
Last edited:
Jim Simon said:
I just want to to report that the Transend 128 GB card I linked to in the first post does NOT work with GH2 Moon Trial 7, recording at 150 Mb/s Not even in 24L mode, recording at 50 Mb/s. Recording stops within mere seconds. I've very surprised (and confused) how anyone has this card working with the GH4.
Click to expand...
The GH2 probably has a card size limit, which for the GH4 is 64GB, although people have had success using that size. I imagine the GH2's tolerance is much lower.
 
Strange thing that there are 2 versions of Transcend U3 SDXC cards. One with the max.write speed 60mb/s and one (ultimate version) with 85mb/s write speed.
Philip Bloom is using the fastest ones http://instagram.com/p/prjDJmKKmP/
Does the slowest ones (60mb/s) work with the GH4 too?
 
rabbit2 said:
Strange thing that there are 2 versions of Transcend U3 SDXC cards. One with the max.write speed 60mb/s and one (ultimate version) with 85mb/s write speed.
Philip Bloom is using the fastest ones http://instagram.com/p/prjDJmKKmP/
Does the slowest ones (60mb/s) work with the GH4 too?
Click to expand...

I'll say this again (though probably not for the last time), max write speed does not matter. Only minimum write speed is important because it doesn't matter how big of a burst the card can do if it cannot maintain the necessary write speed to keep recording footage from the camera.

The U3 speed class guarantees a minimum write speed of 30MB/s (280mbps), which is more than enough for any of the GH4's recording modes. If both cards are U3, then you'll gain nothing from the faster card on the recording end. If read speed is faster on one card, you may have faster offload speed with that card though.
 
Jim Simon said:
And yet, the Transend failed after only a few seconds even at 50 Mb/s
Click to expand...

The Rule of Storage Media: All Storage Will Fail

I haven't seen a single storage manufacturer that doesn't have users' stories of their media failing. If it hasn't happened to you yet, rest assured it will, but that doesn't invalidate the manufacturer. If the card is failing at 50mbps, you have a bad card. This doesn't mean all cards are bad, just the one you got.

Did you test a different Transcend card (i.e. take them up on their lifetime warranty), or are you making a blanket statement based on a single bad card?
 
Sol M. said:
are you making a blanket statement based on a single bad card?
Click to expand...

Not a blanket 'statement' so much as a blanket evaluation. It's possible I got a bad card. Ironically, B&H mistakenly sent me two cards by mistake. I could have tried the second, but knowing it was going back, and not wanting any problems with a refund for the duplicate order, I did not want to open the card.

Still, bad luck for Transend if they did let a bad card off the line. They lost me as a customer, and I will tell others my experience and recommend against them.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top