Horror Story - or - Why I Didn't Sleep Last Night

[J. Bernard Vallon]

I shot a wedding entirely on one 8 gb CF lexar card. It went very well, wonderful couple, hectic day, but lots of good pictures.

I got home, started to dump the card. Half way through the download my g5 dual 2.5ghz crashed hard. Crashed like a junkie at jesus camp. When i rebooted, my card had 44 images out of 700+. The rest were gone. I ran Image Rescue, which comes with Lexar cards, no dice.

This is the worst feeling a photographer can ever have. 1000x worse than a scratch on the best negative. I called the boss. He told me not to panic, dont do anything, give him the card, he has magic software that can rescue anything. "Photo rescue" (i think this is right, he may be wrong on the name)

After a day of worrying, Photo Rescue saved every image except 2, which where probably being downloaded during the crash.

If this is the worst that can happen to a CF card, i'm sold. Loosing 2 frames instead of a whole drive of images is amazing. I'm jumping ship on the reddrives and going CF.

 

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

Wow, that is magic, I'm so glad to hear the story had a happy ending. I can't imagine how scary that is, I mean when you are taking pictures or shooting videos for a living, those ARE your products. It'd be like a restaurant having all of their food go bad. Just a total disaster. It's scary that so much work can be on such a small thing that could potentially fail. But with that software, that's awesome.

 

[J. Bernard Vallon]

If this is the kind of security that CF can offer, I'm sold. I've heard stories like this before, but this is the first time its happened to me.

 

[Unwounded]

Yeah, at my last shop we had some of the first HVX-200 and I was sent out with them and there were just sooo many moments of SHEAR PANIC. It was spooky at first when you'd blow off a p2 card not sure if you "really had it" but then it all stabalized after a while and it was cool. Personally, I started out my order for a red several months ago not even considering the CF module and only going with the Red drive but over the months of hearing more about the CF cards I've definetly changed my tune and am going to go with cf module as my primary recording medium and may even cancel my red drive order (not sure yet though). Hopefully by the time I get mine there will be some higher gig cards out there that will record for a decent amount of time.

 

[bradvr]

Red experience with CF

Red experience with CF

With the Red camera, a concern was what would happen if the Red lost power or the camera "crashed" during a recording to CF (compact flash) or a drive for that matter. As soon as we got our cameras on the test bench my concern turned to curiosity and I simulated a power failure by pulling the plug, the power plug, during a recording. The result? The data was fine except for the last 3 to 7 seconds. The length of bad bits or lost data varied depending on the shooting length, the longer the file the larger the bad bits. The most we ever had were 7 seconds and that was on a 3 minute recording. This is GREAT news. The RED team obviously thought about real world use and this possibility so the files written are sectioned so data loss is minimal. Think of it as similar to changing lenses on an old Bolex - the film in the gate is ruined but the rest of the reel is fine.

If anyone else had tried similar tests with their Red cameras I would be interested in their experience; please share. BH

 

[S. Um]

That's interesting Brad. Sounds like maybe Red buffers some data in RAM and that's what's lost when you pulled the plug.

 

[RedHarry]

" Never put all your eggs in one basket"

" Never put all your eggs in one basket"

I shot a wedding entirely on one 8 gb CF lexar card. It went very well, wonderful couple, hectic day, but lots of good pictures.

As the old saying goes " Never put all your eggs in one basket"

I shoot weddings all the time about 30-40 a year I never use 8GB cards not even 4 or 2GB. I use 1GB and some 512s, to change a card during a wedding takes only fraction of a second and I always take an assistant with me who down loads the images on the spot to my laptop, so if there are any problems I would know there and then. So far touch wood I haven't lost a single image of the weddings I have shot.

Just my 2ç

RedHarry

 

[J. Bernard Vallon]

As the old saying goes " Never put all your eggs in one basket"

I shoot weddings all the time about 30-40 a year I never use 8GB cards not even 4 or 2GB. I use 1GB and some 512s, to change a card during a wedding takes only fraction of a second and I always take an assistant with me who down loads the images on the spot to my laptop, so if there are any problems I would know there and then. So far touch wood I haven't lost a single image of the weddings I have shot.

Just my 2ç

RedHarry

I usually do the same. Saturday I was training a new assistant, didnt want to blindly put him in charge of backups yet, and I've been shooting a lot more RAW images, which chew threw those little 1gbs at about 60/card. I'm glad this was the beginning and end of the problem though.