Camera or Card?
 

One of our crews uses two 5D Mark II's at every shoot and we are starting to notice some dropped/corrupted clips. Some of the clips are corrupted and I have been able to use the Treasured software to fix them. Some of the clips are just skipped completely (1, 2, 3, 5.....) and are nowhere to be found. We have noticed that this seems to happen on the larger (4gb/12 min) files. We only use Transcend 400x cards and we have a few of the Sandisk equivalent.
We haven't noticed this issue on the other set of cameras (yet), so I'm hoping one of the other cameras just has an issue that can be fixed or just replaced. Any ideas/thoughts?

TIA

Chad Dyle
Dyle Films - Wedding/Event Videography

Re: Camera or Card?
 

We have never had a problem with our 5D2s in over three years of use. However in the past couple of weeks we have had problems with two different 5D3s each with a Transcend 400x 32GB card (we have used the cards for a year or more in the 5D2s without problem). In one instance when I hit a Card Full error the final clip was not closed properly so was missing but could be recovered by Treasured. In the second instance the card was unreadable in camera or card reader. In this case Treasured saved our bacon as it was the only card with the shots of bridal preparations whereas we had four cameras recording the ceremony (six including the GoPros) so losing one of those would have been quite so bad.

In future we will not be using the Transcend 400x cards at all even though they may not be to blame if one were to corrupt again then we would kick ourselves. To use only SanDisk Pro 32GB is the only way that we can minimise the chance of a recurrence.

Re: Camera or Card?
 

Hi, Chad

Treasured publisher here:
We have published a study on Canon EOS failure rates.
Not a complete failure Blog Archive Does FW1.2.5 Fix Canon 7D Reliability Problem?

We believe that firmware version is the main driver. For Canon 7D we could clearly see how FW1.2.5 was reducing significantly the failure rate.

For Canon 5D, there has never been epidemic failure rates as in 7D before FW1.2.5
Our advice to avoid failures:
- use latest firmware version
- use first-rate cards with 2x write bandwidth required for application (Canon 5D needs 50Mbits/s)
- keep your camera body cool. Temperature and over-heating lead to electronic and software failures.

You mentioned "skipped" clips. I believe that those clips can also be recovered by Treasured. You need to use "DeepMediaScan" (in Disk > Open damaged disk...) and scan the CF cards for missing footage.


-- Benoît