I think that it is called "spamming " ?

Wheatstone Bridge

Well-known member
I have heard about this problem before but I only experienced it recently. On a recent interview the Sony Camera automatically switched S x S slots while recording and went from slot A to slot B causing part of the interview to be lost during the "switched " process.

Is there any way to correct this problem so that it will not happen in the future and / or is there anyway to recover the part of the interview that was lost during the process ?


Thanks very much.
 

Run&Gun

Well-known member
You mean "spanning", as in the clip spanning across two cards. I've never heard of part of a shot being "lost" when the camera switched cards, at least not on my VariCam's, C300 or F55. Most cameras make a seamless "zero frame loss" clip span from card to card that can be rejoined in an NLE. I generally try to avoid having this happen, though. One fool-proof way you can accomplish this is by only having ONE card in the camera, at a time. Another is to manually switch the cam to the second card before the first fills completely(stop recording, switch, start recording). On my P2 Vari, I run pre-record, so I can actually stop, jump cards and start again and never miss a beat(and possibly have overlap on the two clips), but I would usually try to do that during a question and never an answer from the subject. And you can always treat it like tape: as it approaches FULL, call stop, switch, then call roll again.
 
on the sonny's it is also supposed to be seamless. Though I have heard of reporters/producers panicking and claiming things were lost. However much one feels that to be the case doesn't make it so. Just match the clips up and you will be fine.
 

tarzan

Well-known member
Wheatstone Bridge:

I'm a P2 guy myself, but I've experienced the "spanning" as other posters here have called it as well. Usually it's not an issue if you're editing directly from the cards, but if you ingest the clips into an in-house system, sometimes that's problematic. I agree with the advice to keep only one card in your camera at a time. -Or, what I do is I only keep one card non-write-protected at a time. If my camera has 5 slots, I keep 4 of them write protected, so I'm sure of which one I shot my story on. You should only allow spanning if you're shooting, for example, 4 hours of non-stop court testimony and you know you won't have time to change cards.
 
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