Sony NX5, some files corrupting on SD card

[John Lenihan]

Nigel,

My recommendation is to buy the 128 gig memory unit. I have 4 nx5us for over a year and have never had a problem with the memory units.

The alternative is for you to try various brands of sd cards until you find one that works reliably. For instance, a sony brand sd card.

The only other question I can ask is did you format the sd cards in the camera itself?

John Lenihan

John Lenihan

LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com

[Nigel Wilson]

Hi John, thanks for your suggestions.

I think the formatting could be the issue. I didn’t re-format the cards after they were used the first time – would this have caused the issues?

eg. with “card A”, I did some test footage (only 2-3 minutes worth) at my house before filming the wedding. After the the wedding, ‘card A’ had corrupted files; the previously unused ‘card B’ was fine.
Yesterday, I used ‘card B’ for more practice shooting *without* reformatting the card. NOw it has corrupted files on it.

In my naivety, I thought that because I had only used, say 30 minutes, out of 175 minutes available, I could keep on recording.

Is that my problem? (hoping it is, coz that’s easily addressed going forward!)

Cheers
Nigel

[John Lenihan]

It might be. If you can repeat the experiment, you may have found the ghost.

However, If you format the sd cards on your camera and only use a part of it, you should be able to keep using it on the same camera later without reformatting it again.

I just know I have had problems with SD cards in general, such as working in one type of camera and not another type of camera at the same speed. Whatever you do, test the heck out of them under different situations, before your next shoot. This includes simulating a battery failure while recording so you can feel confident what can hurt you and what doesn’t matter.

John

John Lenihan

LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com

[Ben Kupfer]

Here’s what I did today re ingestion…
– I copied the PRIVATE folder from the card onto my desktop; then used FCPX to ‘import from camera’ (open archive etc, select files). Over half of them ‘failed’ to import.

Remember when you’re copying the files from the camera make sure you copy the ENTIRE folder structure as it exists on the camera. Copying just one folder over (Private) might be your problem…

[Michael Johnston]

Type and class of SD cards matter. I use ScanDisk Extreme Class UI 45Mbs. They are professional grade SD cards and cost much more than other SD cards but I’ve NEVER had a problem with them. DON’T USE CHEAP CARDS IN THE NX5U. Also, don’t forget to do a MEDIA EMPTY of the SD cards from time to time. It’s in the user manual. That’s a CRITICAL procedure in keeping your camera operating without error. Invest in the FMU128 hard drive. You won’t regret it. Finally, if you are copying the card to your Mac, you MUST copy the entire card as is or you’ll have all kinds of problems. Don’t relabel ANYTHING. The entire original file structure MUST be intact for FCP use. Also, there have been all kinds of bugs and errors with FCPX so be aware of that.

[Nigel Wilson]

Thanks for your suggestions guys.

I’ve taken the first SD card back to Panavision where I bought it, and they will send it to the supplier for analysis.

I did a complete wipe of the 2nd card (which had also given me grief) and tested it with a small amount of footage (about 15 minutes of footage; about 20 clips) – it all came out fine. I’ll do a lot more testing before my next paid job.

The weird thing was that the damaged clips would not even play back on the camera. And the cards had hardly been used (the first card had about 3-4 minutes of footage, all deleted, then I maxed it out at a friend’s wedding and lots of files corrupted; the second card worked fine the first time it was used – about 45 minutes at the same wedding, but then produced a bunch of corrupted files when I ‘added’ to the existing footage with some test corporate work); so they hadn’t had much use at all!

And I don’t think the issue was caused by the transfer of files to the Mac. When I transfered the content to my macbook pro, I copied the entire folder over (not sub-parts of it) so that wouldn’t have caused an issue. I also connected the cmaera to my Mac via USB and transferred all content that way; still had issues. I’m wondering if I did just get a bad batch of cards in the first instance.

I will go and invest in an FMU128 as a second layer of security (I can’t risk having files corrupt on paid shoots! – especially weddings!).

I have read of a bug with NX5s having issues when recording to SD card and FMU128 simultaneously. How do I know if I need a firmware upgrade on my camera? (it was purchased 3 months ago from panavision as a ‘demo’ model so I’m not sure how old it is – it had zero hours on it, so it can’t be that old!).

Thanks again for all your help 🙂

Nigel

[John Lenihan]

You will be happier with the fmu128 and probably use it as primary, and if you want backups, use the sd cards as backups

What I would do is to download the update for the nx5u firmware and then read the instructions, and go through the steps of trying to update it. The software will compare tell you the current firmware and then tell you the new firmware and if they are the same, will tell you.

John

John Lenihan

LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com

[Stephen Crye]

Hi;

I have a question. I don’t own an NX5 – yet – but one reason I am considering getting one is that it ought to work with the Sony Picture Motion Browser (or Sony equivalent for the NX5). I use the PMB with my NX70. The PMP reads the files directly from the camera, and concatenates them in to single files that can be 10’s of gigs in size. No need to copy anything directly from the SD card’s internal folders, no need to manually stitch together multiple <2GB “raw” files in your NLE.

Does the NX5 come with this, or am I missing something here?

Thanks,

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T3400, MultiTB SATA, 8GB RAM Vegas 10e x64 DVDA 5.2(build 133) Sony HDR-CX550V