OT: Any ideas what causes this video corruption?

TeetimeNC wrote on 10/10/2009, 7:40 AM
My son-in-law took some video of my new grandson with a Flip Ultra HD (which I recommended to them). Several of the clips have what appears to me to be some kind of corruption, as can be seen in the screen grab below. The top portion is from one frame, the lower portion from a subsequent frame. Any ideas what could be the cause this?

Jerry

Comments

Byron K wrote on 10/10/2009, 10:58 AM
I had a similar thing happen using a cheap kodak z1280, a couple of video clips was squiggly for some reason. Reformatted the card and it seems to be OK now. Before any projects I re-format my cards now.
farss wrote on 10/10/2009, 3:30 PM
Cheap flash memory cards are capable of just about anything.
There's an abundant supply of fake cards and there's even a well documented case of 16GB cards that were actually 8GB cards Someone pulled a real swifty by connecting two address line togther causing the card to appear to the outside world as 16GB when if fact is was just 2 copies of the one 8GB memory. You'd never find this out until you put more than 8GB on the card. Nice trick.

Hoodman cards are good, I'm now using ATP Pro cards. Be warned even genuine cards get built using what the factory has on hand. Much of this doesn't matter / isn't obious when taking stills. It's a big problem when writing video to the card.

Bob.
Tom Pauncz wrote on 10/10/2009, 5:29 PM
Couldn't agree more. Good quality cards are priceless.

I've using nothing but SanDisk Extreme III 16GB & 32Gb cards in my S270 recording unit without a hitch. So far .. touch wood, not a glitch to be had.

Tom
farss wrote on 10/10/2009, 6:08 PM
Both Sandisk and Transcend have been playing silly buggers with their cards of late. Maybe they figured out that us video guys should pay a premium for recording video onto their cards. Certain Class X cards are apparently slower in the latest production runs. Curious that this happened at around the same time that HD Video cards appeared.
If you've got cards that are working fine they'll likely stay that way. You could find however buying the same part number from the same vendor might not yield the same result. It can really pay to test, test and test again these things.

Just as an aside Convergent Design were excited to see cheap CF cards appear claiming 60Mbps write speed. When tested they were actually 10Mbps. The manufacturer's response was "What, you TESTED them, we never expected anyone to do that"

I think the S270 might do a bit of buffering of its own which would help a lot. Using SDHC cards in the EX cameras is what sorts out the various cards. To date, touch wood I've not had a single issue.

Bob.
Laurence wrote on 10/10/2009, 6:17 PM
The Flip camcorders only have built in memory. You might be able to reformat it and reload the software but I'm not sure.
TeetimeNC wrote on 10/11/2009, 2:53 AM
The Flip camcorders only have built in memory. You might be able to reformat it and reload the software but I'm not sure

Thanks Laurence. We reformatted the "drive" (Flip internal memory) and it seems to be working fine. I recommended my son-in-law reformat it after each time he offloads his clips. That is what I do with my video cam and DSLR and have never had corruption problems (knocking on wood).

Jerry