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Corrrupt MXF files from C300 camera
Hi,
Has anyone here had any experience with whole cards shot on the C300 becoming corrupt.
I just had two card backups come back where the clips will play but with severe digital break up. Unfortunately the cards were backed up by the shoot team, not checked and the cards re-initialised so its very hard to tell where the corruption occurred. They were backed up using XF Utility. The file structure seems fine, and the breakup is apparent when viewing with a range of applications. I have encoded the afflicted files to pro-res and they display the same fault. Another card shot that day came back fine. Although interestingly this one was not initialised on the day.
Here is an example screen shot 4622_example.jpg.zip.
I have tried putting the backups back onto a card and seeing if the camera notices the corruption, but it plays back the clips with the same issues. Does anyone have any experience of this? Any suggestions on ways to fix it? I have heard it may be possible to extract the video code from the files, but not had any success with the apps I have tried.
I know that one backup from the card is asking for trouble, but the team were backing up on shoot and rushed our usual double backup protocol in the heat of the moment. It wont happen again. It is however worrying. I dont think its an issue with the cards themselves as they have been used since and been fine, but I am retiring them until I work out what could have caused it. The most worrying thing is it happened to two cards on the same day. One I can put down to freak error, but two …
Any ideas on what could cause the error, and things to try to save the shoot would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
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6 Replies
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Hey Jesse –
I’ve just finished a shoot with a C300 and am experiencing the same picture break up issue you’ve described.
I was wondering if you ever found a solution or workaround?
Cheers, Dean
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Hi Dean.
Unfortunately I didn’t find a way to recover the files and we lost the shoot. I tried nearly all the data video recovery apps i could find online, data recovery specialists and had quite a lengthy consultation with the Cannon desk themselves. My files seemed to be corrupt beyond repair and I had to stop trying to find a solution as every day I spent trying to fix the shoot meant that it cost us more money on what seemed a lost cause.
However I think I found the culprit, and in my case I am pretty sure that it wasn’t the camera that was at fault, but the FW 800 card reader we were using to backup the files. The problem only started when we bought the reader and I managed to recover some cards that displayed similar symptoms using a different reader. Although weirdly the faulty reader even managed to write corruption onto the cards themselves and ruin some individual clips actually on the source media.
The card reader in question was Delock Card Reader-FireWire 800 CF extern, any chance you have the same piece of kit?
Sorry I couldn’t be of more assistance. I hope that you have a better resolution than I did. If you do find a way to recover the files please let me know on here.
Good luck!
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Hey there!
Thanks for your reply… I think you’re right regarding the card-reader in our situation also. However it’s odd as we had F3-generated BPAV files coming in through SD the same reader as the CF cards from the C300… it’s really inconsistent, but a bad combo of card-reader and certain cards I guess.
We’ve been back to the camera cards and the data works fine through an alternative pipeline (and transcoding through Resolve). First day or so lost due to card deletion, but a good salvage nonetheless.
Cheers Dean
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Hey!
I have experienced the same thing with MXF files from my XF-100 and files from my 5D Mk II. My set up was Delock CF card reader connected to a MyBook Studio 2TB hard drive connected to my PB 13″. I lost about half a days material due to corrupt files. I started of by copying the cards directly to the external hard drive. Everything looked fine. I usually take random samples of my files after copying just to see if they work. At the end of the day I sat down to check some more and found that a lot of the files were corrupt and some did not play at all.
What I found after some trial and error was that copying directly to my PB internal HD worked fine. Card reader to external HD did not. My temporary solution was a roundtrip to the internal HD on my PB, then to external drive. What I noticed later was that if the card reader was physically to close to the external HD the files were corrupt. If I moved it away from the HD it worked fine. I have not found a solution or an explanation to what is going on but I am starting to think about RF issues if the reader is to close to the HD? I don’t know../Marco
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Could be that the corruption is caused by faulty connections in the card reader and the position of the FW into the reader exasperates this? So its actually the way the cable runs rather than the readers proximity to the HD? Just a thought. Either way I would but a new card reader!
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If for whatever reason your card structure doesn’t come across intact, what can you do if you want to edit the corrupt C300 MXF on Mac OS X? As you know, Final Cut Pro and other NLE system need a correct card structure to read and ingest C300 MXF footage. In this case, transcoding MXF files to FCP (X) or other NLE natively compatible format in a 3rd party app is a feasible workaround.
Source: https://video-playback-tips.com/tag/how-to-fix-a-corrupt-c300-clips/
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