FS-CV: Delete clips option is a bad idea...

[Andy Johnson-Laird]

I made the mistake of showing up at a shoot without previously having reformatted the 100GB in the FS-CV. I only noticed this after about an hour's worth of video had been recorded. (Duh. It was early. The caffeine hadn't kicked in...)

Anyway, I thought I would delete several large clips, so, at a break I figured out the clip numbers and deleted them using the Utility menu, Delete Clip option.

Yeah. I know what the manual says about fragmentation, but what it should say is:

=====

If you delete clips in the unit, not only do you run the risk of disk fragmentation causing performance problems with recorded video and audio, but also there is a risk that the firmware of the FS-CV will get its panties in a knot and will suffer from some form of RAM-based fragementation. The symptoms will be that the time code will updated jerkily and in much slower than real time, the red "recording" light will flash more intermittently, and the resulting audio and video you allegedly recorded will have so many dropped frames and artifacts that it will make you wonder what on earth Focus Enhancements programmers who wrote the firmware could have done to make things this bad just because you, gak!, deleted clips! :) .

So, if you really want to delete clips, one way to avoid the RAM-based fragmentation is to delete all the clips you want, power the unit off, and then power the unit back on. This way, the RAM-based data pertaining to the clips on disk will be up to date and the RAM-based fragmentation will not be a factor. Hard disk fragmentation may still be an issue but the unit is more likely to be usable at the shoot.

====

Note: The "RAM-based fragmentation" may be an incorrect inference on my part, but the phenomenon is real -- and power cycling the unit fixes it (which it would not do if it was disk-based fragmentation).

Regards
Andy