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Forced Re-Formatting Wipes whole SD Card!?


Charlie Manton

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I've just been on a small shoot today and half way through filming with the Sony A7Rii it forces me to re-format the SDXC card... Otherwise I can't film. So I re-format it as I had to film and all the footage was wiped. This has happened twice now...

 

Trying to recover the footage - any recommendations??

 

And WHY is this happening?

 

Thanks!!

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I've just been on a small shoot today and half way through filming with the Sony A7Rii it forces me to re-format the SDXC card... Otherwise I can't film. So I re-format it as I had to film and all the footage was wiped. This has happened twice now...

 

Trying to recover the footage - any recommendations??

 

And WHY is this happening?

 

Thanks!!

 

I really don't know anything about the camera or the card, but could it be that your card is full and the camera's solution to continue filming is to wipe the card to free up space?...

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've just been on a small shoot today and half way through filming with the Sony A7Rii it forces me to re-format the SDXC card... Otherwise I can't film. So I re-format it as I had to film and all the footage was wiped. This has happened twice now...

 

Trying to recover the footage - any recommendations??

 

And WHY is this happening?

 

Thanks!!

 

you formatted a card which was loaded into the camera and was recorded to?

that's beyond cardinal sin :)

 

i think we are missing a bunch of information here anyway

 

i quickly googled a7rii and there appears to be an issue if you erase files on the card by not using the camera.

this seems very similar to me to other sony workflow process.

 

i just worked with sony f65, and our DMT could not erase the SRMemory cards at his station - they had to be formatted by the camera, otherwise the file structure would be corrupted

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If this is happening a lot without the card being removed from the camera, the card or the camera are faulty.

 

However, I suspect this may be because the card was removed from the camera and put in (for instance) someone's macbook, which of course insisted on writing lots of metadata to it - thumbnails, previews, trash and other management data, and so on. Presumably this was done in such a way that the camera didn't like the resulting filesystem when the card was put back in it.

 

It was probably still possible to read the card in a computer at that point, but the camera might not have agreed to record to it until it had been reformatted to its liking.

 

I think the moral of the story is fairly clear. Your original camera media is not your video assist.

 

P

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General good practice is to format a fresh card at the start of the day. Once you reload or remove the card from the camera, it should go straight to the DIT, loader, or whomever is handling the data and get copied immediately to a hard drive. Put in a new card, format it, and continue shooting.

 

Once you remove a card from the camera, don't put it back in and keep shooting on it. Always format the new card before shooting and have a system in place to verify that the footage on this card has already been copied, verified, and is otherwise good to go BEFORE formatting the card.

 

Once you format a card, you may not be able to recover any existing footage on it without data recovery tools. And once you shoot over a formatted card, the previous data is gone forever. So don't put a shot card in the camera that you don't intend to format right away, and don't leave precious footage in the camera when the camera is not working. Take it out of the camera and copy it.

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Never, ever, only have one memory card for your camera. If you have a problem with the card, remove it, format another, and attempt to recover the files from the card with the problem. I wrote a blog post about how to get data off a corrupted card.

If you have more than one problem with the same memory card, just throw it away. $30 is nothing compared to having to tell a client that you lost half their day.

Edited by Jon Kline
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