Some people have had luck with a few power cycles and mounts and unmounts, others have had luck with Disk Utility repairing it but I wasn't one of them. Now this is a very rare error and unfortunately there's not much you can do about it on location. Powering it back on I saw the dreaded "FORMAT ERROR!" in red on the screen. So I tried to unmount the camera with no response and ended up just power cycling it since it was completely unresponsive and the Finder on the laptop couldn't unmount it even after waiting 5+ mins.
I suspect it was something to do with the "LASTCLIP.TXT" file which is locked by default. While slow -as expected- it was going and I told everyone to take a coffee break while it copied over.Ībout 400MBs into the copy there was a Finder Read/Write error, I didn't have permission for something or other and it konked out. So, finding a Firewire cable and setting the camera to be a Firewire device and hooking everything up I began the copy from camera to laptop. USB xfers are multiple times faster than Firewire at this point so I've been going with USB regularly, often and without issue when there's no card reader available. Resetting the cameras and restoring the Firmware seems to have no effect. Namely extremely slow and getting slower over time Firewire transfers. Now this camera and another we've been using have had Firewire issues in the past. What happened was someone forgot a standard USB cable to load in footage from an HVX200 camera to a Hard Drive - I've had extremely bad luck with going directly from the camera to a hard drive in the past so I avoid it at almost all costs now - and since we were on location with pretty much nothing around us in the way of stores and rummaging around through everyone's bags and equipment cases looking for a USB cable I decided to load in the footage via Firewire. It's a FORMAT ERROR! (I think it actually reads "FORMAT ERR!") which can occur very rarely on P2 cards for seemingly no reason.
PANASONIC P2 CARD E SERIES SERIES
"A"SeriesĪpproximately 5 years when used 100% per day / 10 years when used 50% per dayĬurrent A and recent generation R and H series P2 cards have a service life of one hundred years or more when filled with data and overwritten once a day.The error message blinks which is why it looks faded here. But 5 years of continuous use seems enough to me and in 5 years we'll be on 512 Gb cards for $400 right! P 2 Card Comparison: "E"Series vs. The main difference apart from A cards being double the price of the new E series is the service life of the card 5 years VS 100 years.
Panasonic offers two lines of P2 solid-state memory Cards, the “A” Series and “E” Series. The chart below highlights their similarities and differences.
PANASONIC P2 CARD E SERIES FULL
There is now a 64 Gig card that runs around $900 so you can finally get 1 hour of full quality video per card!! For the run and gun type stuff I plan to do, I'm thinking I'll need at least 2 x 64 Gig cards or I may even go the AVCHD route ? Perhaps the answer is to shoot in 720p? Model #ĭifference between P2 A Series and P2 E series? Below is a table that shows how many minutes of footage you can record on a P2 card.