Your memory card can be the most important piece of gear on a shoot. It stores the one thing that can get you paidbut what do you do if it becomes corrupt? Ive had a bunch of memory devices become corrupt; a brand-new CF card while shooting HDR and portraits on Zuma Beach in California, a trusty SD card in my main camera while shooting video interviews for Under Armour, and even an AJA hard drive while recording my multi-camera sports production for ESPN.
I was on set with Under Armour, shooting video for interviews and event coverage of the Under Armour All-America event at the end of 2014. We had a fairly straight-forward set up, with an A-camera and B-camera. All cameras were Nikon DSLRs; a D750 as our main or A-camera, a D810 as our B-camera, and we also had a D7000 as a backup B-camera.
As we were getting to the end of Day 1 of production, I had already dumped my memory cards to my computer a few times that day. We had just interviewed a a few key people, both high school players and a few professional athletes. Knowing that the stakes were high, I decided to dump these cards again, even though they weren’t full.
I shut each of the cameras off, and pulled the memory cards out. When I plugged them into my card reader, the B-camera showed up, but the A-camera was nowhere to be found. I started to sink in my chair, not knowing what to do. We had lost the main camera from our interview.
However, this wasn’t the first time Ive encounter a card corruption like this. I decided to open up Mac Disk Utility and saw the memory card pop up in the left-hand column. After a quick 5-minute disk repair, the card popped up in Finder and all my files were there, ready to be copied onto my backup drives.
But know I needed to know why.
What causes a memory card to go corrupt?
- Interrupting the process of writing files to/from the card
- Removing the card from the camera without turning the camera off first
- Files could still being read/written when the camera is on
- Removing the card from the computer without ejecting it
- When shooting video, renaming the files or changing file structure of the card
- Static shock or power surge
- Touching the gold contacts on SD cards
- Not formatting the memory cards in the camera
One of the downsides to using DSLRs for this project was the lack of simultaneous dual-card recording. In the video world, cameras record at a certain bit-rate, which are similar to megapixels on the stills side. Due to the amount of power it takes to record video, you can’t record to dual cards. The cameras simply don’t have enough power to write to both cards the same way you could if you were shooting stills. More professional video cameras like the Canon C100 or better can record simultaneously.
What would I do different?
Another option I could have used was an external HDMI recorder. Atomos makes a few great recorders that could record broadcast-quality from the HDMI port on the side of my camera. It would have been a good idea to use the external recorder as my primary recording, and use the SD cards as my backup recording.
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One of my cards failed last year. I was in the middle of a car club drive, as club photographer, when suddenly the camera said “card not formatted.” I panicked and put another card in the camera. But most of my shots were gone. I found an application that recovered all but one image, and was able to recover. It was a pain because the repair software renamed the files starting with 000001, but they were in random order (I presume they were in the order actually recorded to the card, not the order shot). Now I carry 5 or… Read more »
Herschel – That’s awful, but eventually it happens to everybody. It’s tough to carry 16gb cards when shooting something like the Nikon D810. You’d only be able to get about 200 shots per card.
I have heard so many stories about corrupt cards that I have always stayed away from the largest cards. Right now most of my cards are are 8 or 16GB. However, In 15 years of shooting digital, I have never once had a card corrupt on me even while commiting some of the sins listed above. The one thing I have always done is format the cards in camera almost every time I return a card to the camera. Maybe that’s it or maybe I have just been lucky.
Regarding formatting SD cards in camera versus computer, I found this SD Card Formatting utility on Photofocus (January 2015 or earlier).. Should I use this recommended utility or formatting in camera?
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/
Either is fine
I shoot a variety of cameras, so I always format the card in the camera. But Rich is correct…either will work fine.
I am not a professional photographer but I know the pain of having a corrupt memory card, so I always try to download the pictures as soon as I can. Thanks for the tips on keeping your data safe they were very helpful.
One of my cards failed last year. I was in the middle of a car club drive, as club photographer, when suddenly the camera said “card not formatted.” I panicked and put another card in the camera. But most of my shots were gone. I found an application that recovered all but one image, and was able to recover. It was a pain because the repair software renamed the files starting with 000001, but they were in random order (I presume they were in the order actually recorded to the card, not the order shot). Now I carry 5 or… Read more »
Herschel – That’s awful, but eventually it happens to everybody. It’s tough to carry 16gb cards when shooting something like the Nikon D810. You’d only be able to get about 200 shots per card.
I am not a professional photographer but I know the pain of having a corrupt memory card, so I always try to download the pictures as soon as I can. Thanks for the tips on keeping your data safe they were very helpful.
Regarding formatting SD cards in camera versus computer, I found this SD Card Formatting utility on Photofocus (January 2015 or earlier).. Should I use this recommended utility or formatting in camera?
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/
I shoot a variety of cameras, so I always format the card in the camera. But Rich is correct…either will work fine.
Either is fine
I have heard so many stories about corrupt cards that I have always stayed away from the largest cards. Right now most of my cards are are 8 or 16GB. However, In 15 years of shooting digital, I have never once had a card corrupt on me even while commiting some of the sins listed above. The one thing I have always done is format the cards in camera almost every time I return a card to the camera. Maybe that’s it or maybe I have just been lucky.
Hello, you didn’t mention 24fps and 25fps. Are these frame rates supported?
Frame rate support is based on the camera, not the SD cards.