Juan, many thanks for the explanation of the Restore Media screen. That makes perfect sense as to that little "DS" folder confusing the camera into throwing up that warning screen. I rarely do a card Format and usually use Delete All Clips instead. Am I correct that a full Format Card would wipe out my Picture Profile settings as well as the Camera Settings files?

dave

How can formatting the card wipe out pp settings ?
pp's are on the camera not the card, correct ?
I reformat my cards every time, i don't delete clips.

Paul.

Okay, you might need to help me out here. I was under the impression that the PP's were stored on the card as well as in the camera, no? That way you can transfer profiles to other cameras when, for example, you are doing a multicamera shoot and want to give the same profile to all the cameras. Or, is it only the camera settings/prefs that are saved to the card? Of course, I guess you can format the card and then re-save the settings to the card.

You can store what's known as a "Setup File" to an SxS Pro card. It's actually a complete copy of all menu settings including the picture profiles, essentially a backup of all your camera's settings. Only one Setup File can be stored on one SxS memory card. You can then transfer these settings to another EX camera via the card.

Page 76 of the PDF version of the EX1 owner's manual will show you how to do it.

Formatting a card is the same as any other read/write media, such as a hard drive: everything gets erased.

[QUOTE=Paul Kellett;1140520]pp's are on the camera not the card, correct ?[QUOTE]

Yes, they can be transferred to an SxS Pro card in addition to all other camera perferences.

- Don

Its just an extra folder and file on the SxS card so if you want to save it separately from the card you can download it to your computer ( in fact you should do this.)
If you need it just copy it back to the SxS card.
Pretty good system actually.

Lenny

Ah right, i just read page 76.
So if i follow this procedure all my settings and pp's go onto the card, then i can put this card into another camera and my settings will be applied there.

I have a question though, i have 6 pp's in my camera, i presume they'll all get copied to the second camera, overwriting that camera's pps, and that camera's owner might not be to happy about that, is there any way of transfering just one pp to the second camera ?

Thanks.
Paul.

Not according to the manual. I would get the owner of the other camera to back up his/her camera's settings and then copy them back when the shoot is complete.

- Don

The other reason I rarely do a Format is because I have named all my cards (CARD_A, CARD_B, etc.) for sequential reasons when I'm doing long-form recordings. When you format the card, you lose the card's naming along with everything else.

Absolutely. however, here's another thought for everyone's consideration: Not too long ago my wife took a still camera refresher course at a local college. Her instructor cautioned everyone against the practice of simply deleting an unwanted picture from the memory card, saying that he's seen instances of ghosting of the previous image underneath the new image when the camera takes another shot and it ends up in the same spot as the deleted one. He said to leave the unwanted image as is and reformat the entire card after the images have been transferred to computer. I hadn't heard of this before and now I'm wondering if the same rules should apply to solid state video cards as well.

- Don

As this conversation has taken an entirely new direction can I suggest moving it to a new thread titled something like "saving PP settings" or "best way to erase cards?".

The original subject is important and gets diluted when discussion moves somewhere else.

Thanks.

I write on mine with a marker pen, 1, 2 ,3 etc.

Paul.

Juan, No one from Sony has contacted me about this.

Lenny Levy

The one time I actually lost a clip, I had not reformatted my card - I had simply deleted the clips - and when I went to play back the damaged clip, I saw a flash frame from a clip that I had deleted from my last shoot. That convinced me to always reformat my cards.