Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card...
by Thomas Misny
on
Dec 19, 2008 at 4:45:34 am
Hi --
I have a pretty serious issue with potentially lost data for the Sony XDCAM EX1.
Earlier tonight I shot a full 8 GB card followed by a full 16 GB card.
On the 8 GB card, my first 10 or so shots were fine... but starting on clip 929_20902, Clip Browser freezes and will not import the clip. A thumbnail image of the clip shows up but the clip will not play. So from clips 2092-2117, this happens, then from clip 2118 on, it's fine.
When I put the card back into the camera in Media Mode, the camera freezes. No thumbnails are viewable.
The 16GB card I shot after the 8GB card is completely fine and plays back in the camera fine.
I have no clue what the issue is... I've owned my EX1 since February 08 and have never had a problem until now.
Can somebody please help shed some light on this situation!
Re: Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card... by Thomas Misny on Dec 19, 2008 at 5:25:55 am
No -- there are 26 clips on this card (of 45 clips total) that seem to be damaged. Each is 10 secs - 2 min max. None of them continue on to the next card, so it's not an issue of continuation between cards. It's an issue of something going wrong in this one 8GB card that has damaged these 26 clips. What really gets me though is that I can see thumbnail images of the 26 clips, even though I cannot play them. They have to be accessible somehow, right??
Re: Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card... by Don Greening on Dec 19, 2008 at 9:29:12 am
Thomas,
Copy the BPAV folder in its entirety over to a hard drive. Put the copied BPAV folder into another folder. Name your folder whatever you want. Start Clip Browser and navigate to your named folder. Clip Browser should see the BPAV folder inside and display the clip thumbnails. See if you can access your problem clips now and import them.
If you're on a Mac platform you can also try importing your clips using Sony's Transfer Tool app. Anyway, see how things go. Sometimes the EX1 will find a directory error on a card and ask if you want to "restore" the card. Did this prompt come up on your EX at all? Restoring does not reformat the card or touch the actual clips but instead will fix possible directory issues. But before you start messing with the card it's advisable to back up the card's BPAV folder as I've outlined above.
If you're successful in retrieving the problem clips then use your camera to reformat the card, rather than just emptying it. This will help to avoid a similar problem in the future.
Re: Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card... by Keith Golinski on Dec 30, 2008 at 4:38:56 pm
I have been having a similar issue with just one of my cards. It happens completely random. This latest time the first four minutes of a 6 minute clip are not showing up. The last 2 minutes shows up and play fine. The clip, on import, through the XDCAM transfer software broke the clip up into parts. Part one won't play. Part two will play and import. The clips showed up as .SMI files. I copied the original BPAV files off the cards on set and then imported and transfered to .mp4 files for FCP after the shoot. I took the original BPAV file and copied back to a different card and then tried to play it back in the camera and it still was missing the first 4 minutes of the clip. I re-imported the files into the XDCAM transfer direct from the new card and still was not able to retrieve the first part of the clip. Is there anything I can do?
It's difficult to know whether it's a corrupt file directory on the card or the 4 minutes of video is actually missing. In any event you're not having much luck copying things back and forth because you're copying the corruption as well. Try the File Salvage trial version and determine whether or not the program "sees" the missing video. If it does then you may have some luck retrieving the clip(s).
Another way to go might be using the directory repair program called DiskWarrior (if you already have it) to rebuild the directory on the card. This is uncharted territory because I don't know if the program will rebuild a FAT32 directory, which is the SxS Pro memory card formatting. If you have DiskWarrior it might be worth a shot. DiskWarrior is a Mac-only program but it's very good at what it does. I went back in your history here at the COW and I see that you're a Mac/Final Cut Studio user, so you might already have this great program. If you go this route try rebuilding the directory on a copy of the BPAV folder first and not the original one on the card.
I've been shooting to SxS Pro cards for over a year now and have never had an instance of losing video clips. When it's time to delete or empty one of my cards I do a reformat of the cards in-camera every 4th or 5th time instead of just dragging the files to the trash with a card inserted into my Macbook Pro. If you're having a continuing problem with just one of your cards even with good preventative maintenance then I would strongly suggest you return the card to Sony and get another one.
Oh, and make sure you always insert a card into your camera rather firmly to make sure it connects properly.
Re: Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card... by Keith Golinski on Jan 1, 2009 at 4:24:19 pm
Wow! Great reply! Thank you. I will try your recomendations when I get back to the office tomorrow. I do format my cards in camera but have been trashing the BPAV files as well on my MBP. It's unfortunate if it turns out to be a bad card. I have a feature coming up that I would love to use my camera to shoot with but possibly getting more bad cards from Sony makes me nervous. I guess I can have faith in that I haven't seen a lot of posts about lost data so it must just be dumb luck. Thanks again and I will let you know if I have any sucess in retrieving the corrupted file.
Re: Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card... by Gordon Waddell on Mar 25, 2009 at 6:51:40 am
- Don
I am hoping you can help me. I have had several problems with my XD video transfers.
1. firstly as video was being transferred for me apparently some errors came up on the screen. now of cause I cannot convert the files to working .mxf files and as we were shooting a lot of footage, the ordinal video has been shot over. is there any way of fixing these files?
2. Due to the video error messages my assistant, instead of telling about this problem, decided to just grab the last hour of video off the disc and simply copied the files from the BPAVCLPR - all files contained in there, with no other files from the disc. again I am unable to read them in the clip browser to be able to convert them to mxf.
this was a conference shoot and I am hopeful that he hasn’t totally stuffed it up. can you offer up any advice please...!!!!
Re: Help! Lost Clips on EX1 SxS card... by Craig Seeman on Mar 25, 2009 at 2:10:10 pm
It's hard to tell without technical details.
EX files from card or HD files from disc?
Using ClipBrowser to transfer?
What was the error message?
If it's just the metadata that's bad it might be fixable. If it's the video/audio it may not.
Don't hire assistants who don't even have the basic wherewithal to notify you of a problem let alone decide to "fix" things using procedures no professional should do.
