GH3 Corrupt MTS Files

[Corey Graham]

I've been shooting weddings with GH3's for the past few months, and something I'm noticing is that I'm getting 1 or 2 corrupt clips on each card. The problem always happens when I try to bring the clips into Premiere -- it will either import the clips without audio and with horrible green blocky artifacts all over; or I'll simply get a message from Premiere saying that the file has a header error.

Is anyone else running into this problem? Is there a way to restore these files? The strange thing is that they play fine in Windows Media Player.

I'm also using good Lexar/Panasonic/Sandisk SDHC cards.

[Corey Graham]

Just to clarify the solutions I've tried to repair the clips:

1. No Adobe program will open the clips, as I thought I'd just take them into After Effects and render them out again.
2. Panasonic offers a few recovery apps, none of which benefited me at all.

I finally found a program that will open and export to a new working file -- a video conversion program called Handbrake. It's not ideal (as I would just like to simply repair the original clips), but it works.

[Bruce Foreman]

Originally Posted by Corey Graham

I'm also using good Lexar/Panasonic/Sandisk SDHC cards.

Drop Lexar from that list, not quite a "junk" brand but not one of the better ones either. Panasonic might be OK but the only ones I really trust are SanDisk.

Also check your card reader, the only time I had a couple of corrupted files was when the multi format media reader on my computer was going out. I replaced it with an external that plugged into a USB port and that worked fine.

[Corey Graham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Foreman

Also check your card reader, the only time I had a couple of corrupted files was when the multi format media reader on my computer was going out. I replaced it with an external that plugged into a USB port and that worked fine.

Thanks Bruce, you may have nailed the problem for me. Up until a couple days ago, I was convinced that I was just buying crappy card readers, because they always performed intermittently -- they would randomly lose the connection with the computer, often in the middle of transferring. But I just tried swapping the ports I connected them to (from the USB 3.0 ports to USB 2.0 ports) and now the card reader is performing perfectly. Leads me to conclude that I have faulty USB 3.0 ports. And that totally makes sense that an intermittent drive could corrupt some files during transfer.

[Corey Graham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Foreman

Drop Lexar from that list, not quite a "junk" brand but not one of the better ones either. Panasonic might be OK but the only ones I really trust are SanDisk.

Funny thing in my experience is that the only brand of card that has caused a corrupt card -- as in, the computer can't read the data and you have to run recovery software on it to recreate file/folder structure -- is Sandisk.

[Jeff Harper]

I wonder if changing the card reader will help. Please keep us posted. I've never had a corrupt file, thank goodness. It will happen, eventually, I'm sure, but I will know at least to try changing the reader to see what happens. Luck Corey.

[Corey Graham]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I wonder if changing the card reader will help. Please keep us posted. I've never had a corrupt file, thank goodness. It will happen, eventually, I'm sure, but I will know at least to try changing the reader to see what happens. Luck Corey.

I've been through 3 card readers already, each more expensive than the last, haha. Thanks Jeff!