5D MK II | Lock Up Issue
 

Hey everyone:

I thought I'd share an update. I had complained about our 5D MK II locking up during filming a while back. Some folks suggested a UDMA card. Turns out, we had a faulty PCB assembly in the camera. Canon service replaced it free of charge under warranty. I just got it back today, so I have not tested it yet, but hopefully all is well.

I also thought I'd share an image in case anyone out there is having similar issues:
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachme...1&d=1255628909

When this has happened, we lose whatever shot we were working on completely. The camera becomes completely non-responsive, and locks up completely. The power switch doesn't work, the live view button doesn't work, the shutter release doesn't work, the set button doesn't work...nothing works. You have to physically remove the batteries to get it to turn off.

The little set of white blocks on the right side of the screen is the only indicator that we ever had.

Hopefully this helps someone!
~ Charles

Thanks Charles; moved from Weddings / Events to Canon EOS 5D Mk. II.

Very interesting! I've had problems with a certain Sandisk Extreme III 8GB card for the past few months, and on another forum about a dozen other people chimed in with the exact same failure with cards of a similar date range. The symptom was exactly as you described, requiring the battery to be removed to recover from it.

The same card causes a similar problem in my 7D, so I have been assuming it was a card manufacturing defect rather than a camera problem.

That's what I thought too, until I finally called. Now -- they did recommend upgrading my card to the UDMA version, but I sent it in anyways, and I'm glad I did.

I post my results back here once we test it at a few shoots.

~ Charles

I've had the same isue on a couple of shoots recently and I'm using the 8GB Sandisk Extreme III as well. So it looks like I have to isolate the card that's causing the issue.

By the way Tramm, thanks again for your incredible work on Magic Lantern!

Charles, how often did this occur for you? I've experienced this probably 5 times in the past 6 months.

I didn't get the white blocks indicator. That would seem to suggest that the card is not fast enough for the data stream?

Since we've had the camera, I would say its probably happened approximately 10 times.

~ Charles

I think this is a card by card thing. I've been using a 32 gig Kingston 133x card without incident for months now.

One thing you defintely want to do is format the card in camera prior to use. But I'm assuming you already were doing that. Magic Lantern creates a slight incentive to not do that (so as to not have to move the FW back onto the card after each format), but it's still a best practice in my book. Writing to a fragmented card can only slow things down, and that buffer indicator is telling you the card can't keep up for some reason.

But my guess is that it's the specific card you are using...

I reformat every card before use and have had the freeze up with the "White film strip" sporadically. In fact it didn't happen all summer that I can remember and we were shooting a ton of stuff. It did lock up a couple of times on the last month or so.

Update: no lock-ups since repair.

But to be fair, we changed to the new Extreme Pro 16GB UDMA cards. :-(

We'll never know...
~ Charles