What happens if...

B

Burners

Well-known member
While if you are recording (in terms of footage lost):

1) Your battery dies \ is detached
2) The SD card door \ hatch is opened

Accidents do happen and i'd like to know whether you dont lose any footage already recorded or if you lose the current clip etc.

Thanks
 
There is a tool you can use its called Avcam restorer incase of such emergencies, that is if the footage got corrupted.
Never used it though so I cant say if it works or not.
 
If you open the card door it'll stop recording as soon as possible. You don't lose any footage.

If the power is suddenly cut during recording, the next time you power on the unit it'll ask you if you want to repair the clip you were recording when the power got shut off. I tested this by using the wall AC adapter and unplugging it during recording.

I haven't tried it with the battery dying; I would assume that in the worst case scenario it'd act like the sudden power cut, but since it has the electronics in the battery to communicate exact battery state, I wouldn't be all that surprised to find out the system might actually be able to predict imminent power-off and automatically save your current recording state without needing to repair the clip on next power-on. When I have a dead-ish battery I'll try to remember to test this.

What I wouldn't recommend doing is popping the door open and then trying to grab and eject the card before it finishes writing. It only takes a second or two for the system to stop recording and try to close the file system, but if you are in a mad rush and you eject the card before it can do that, it's possible to end up with a damaged clip that can't be repaired in-camera. I tried that as a test, and that's what happened. I was, however, able to repair the clip using the AVCCAM Restorer (which gets installed when you install AVCCAM Viewer).

So -- the system is pretty well protected from you losing any footage at all, but don't try jerking out cards before the system's ready for you to. It has the ability to recover from that scenario, but I wouldn't want to push my luck.
 
doesn't the hmc have that internal battery feature that if you're recording it will record up to like, 7 seconds before it shuts off if the battery is removed or dies?
 
I had the cam stop recording the moment I pulled down the card slot and it didn't loose any footage. It's actually quite convenient. As Barry says it takes a lot less time to finish writing the cards.. On the HVX I remember it taking 10 seconds or so to do the swap over from the two cards and I did pop a card a couple of times during this.. being in that eager beaver to get downloading and it boned me pretty hard... I have become more patient now and either way.. swapping SD cards is a couple of seconds... Remember how long it took to swap a tape out. On my XL1 it would almost take 30 seconds for the cam to start recording again after switching tapes.
 
When I used our first HMC I was using an external battery so I can tell you first hand that when the battery cable popped out of the camera mid shooting everything went dead as expected. When I plugged it back in the camera came up and said there was a problem with the card and that it had to do a repair. Well luckily I had my XH-A1 handy because it took about 8 minutes to repair the card. Once it completed the repair everything was just dandy and I hadn't lost any of the footage up until the power went out.

The moral of the story is don't pull the battery out of the unit or kill the power while the camera is recording and wait until the camera has completely shut down ;)
 
Barry_Green said:
If the power is suddenly cut during recording, the next time you power on the unit it'll ask you if you want to repair the clip you were recording when the power got shut off. I tested this by using the wall AC adapter and unplugging it during recording.
Click to expand...

I also 'tested' this. First time using the camera in anger, a wedding guest tripped over the power lead during the vows on his way to the bar!!!

Upon restarting the camera it asked me if I wanted to repair the clip. Of course I said yes. This process took a couple of minutes and the clip was fine. Of course I did lose about 3-4 minutes during the wedding vows, but at least I had a second camera :beer:
 
Barry_Green said:
...

I haven't tried it with the battery dying; I would assume that in the worst case scenario it'd act like the sudden power cut, but since it has the electronics in the battery to communicate exact battery state, I wouldn't be all that surprised to find out the system might actually be able to predict imminent power-off and automatically save your current recording state without needing to repair the clip on next power-on. When I have a dead-ish battery I'll try to remember to test this.

...
Click to expand...

I can't say for sure, but the camera still has some power in the battery to clean up things before it does an auto-shutdown. Most equipment I've seen, will do an auto-shutdown when a battery is low, rather than waiting for the battery to go lower and have a system crash or freeze-up. I'll bet that it finishes the write operation, closes the file, and shuts down the camera.

Might be interesting to take a low battery, a blank card, and record until the battery dies, to see what happens.


Bob Diaz
 
BobDiaz said:
I can't say for sure, but the camera still has some power in the battery to clean up things before it does an auto-shutdown. Most equipment I've seen, will do an auto-shutdown when a battery is low, rather than waiting for the battery to go lower and have a system crash or freeze-up. I'll bet that it finishes the write operation, closes the file, and shuts down the camera.

Might be interesting to take a low battery, a blank card, and record until the battery dies, to see what happens.


Bob Diaz
Click to expand...

I also think that when the camera detects that the battery is out of juice it stops recording (as if you had hit the record button to stop recording) and powers off.
This camera with the new batteries has the ability to detect the charge of th battery.
 
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