# Canon 600D, Sandisk and Corrupted MOV files



## SilviaLozza (Aug 1, 2014)

Hello everyone!
This is my first topic so nice to meet you!

I'm a videographer based in London, to film I use a Canon 600D with different lenses and SD cards, generally Kingston and Sandisk.

I need your help to figure out a problem that happened yesterday, and that I can't understand.

I filmed 1 hour interviews and cutaways for a documentary.

Gear: Canon 600D - lens 55-250mm - SD Card Sandisk Extreme 64gb brand new, first use and formatted in the camera.

After copying the files to the hard drive I noticed that both on the hard drive and on the SD card some files weren't previewing.
The first 10 files were fine, but the other 56 weren't giving any preview.
I tried to open them, nothing. Mac OS told me that they were not video files.
I could see the weight of the files but I couldn't open them.

I tried with every mov recovery software possible, and also with a website that analyses the file to see if audio and video are still in there, but just one of the 56 videos was recoverable.

Obviously, I've lost all the footage and luckily I can reshoot it, but if it was a wedding.. I can't even imagine.

Has something like this ever happened to you?

The thing I don't get is ... why the first 10 videos are fine?
If the first 10 are fine, so it's not the SD corrupted, but something has corrupted the file while filming...

I would love to hear your thoughts!

Silvia


----------



## pablo (Aug 1, 2014)

Hi Silvia

Sorry to hear about your disaster, hopefully something can be done to recover the files. The fact the data is there (the weight) suggests that the files haven't been closed properly.

This could be because of battery failure, turning the camera off mid shot or most likely, a buffering problem, usually caused by cards that are too slow to write the data.

Are your cards all class 10? Canon say class 6 is fine... Not convinced myself.


----------



## SilviaLozza (Aug 5, 2014)

pablo said:


> Are your cards all class 10? Canon say class 6 is fine... Not convinced myself.



Yep my cards are all class 10, 45 mb/s and up...

I wanted to *update* everyone:

After many checks with the SanDisk customer service, they found out that the SD Card I bought from Amazon was fake , a counterfeit.

After that I reported the seller to Amazon, they apologised 'cause it was a labelled ‘Fulfilled by Amazon’ seller, and they gave me a refund.
I looked into some comments from other people on other SanDisk sellers pages (not the one I bought from) and saw that people reported the same problems. First videos ok, than all corrupted, and always was caused by a counterfeit SD card.

I wasn't able to recover my files but at least I know what I'll have to look out for next times I buy a SD Card.

Be aware of counterfeit people!


----------



## Valvebounce (Aug 6, 2014)

Hi Silvia. 
Thank you for this info, a conclusion is often neglected! 
Sorry you got "had" with a fake, at least you were able to redo the lost shoots, and got your money back on the card. Just imagine how much worse it could have been if it had been a wedding like you said! It really doesn't bear thinking about. 
It just goes to show that even buying branded is not always enough I guess what we can all take away from this is to do trial runs with new gear before a critical job, but even then you may not have taken enough footage to show the problem! Hmmmm what to do? :-\

Cheers Graham. 



SilviaLozza said:


> Yep my cards are all class 10, 45 mb/s and up...
> 
> I wanted to *update* everyone:
> 
> ...


----------



## Mt Spokane Photography (Aug 6, 2014)

That's a story that is all too common.

I prefer to buy cards from a reputable camera store, but will buy ones that are sold by Amazon, but not a third party unless its a store I know. Adorama, for example, sells on Amazon, but not thru the Amazon Prime.

Chinese sellers are getting clever, and shipping stock to Amazon to sell on their Prime program. Most of them are honest, but counterfeit batteries and flash cards are so common in China that it can be difficult for a buyer to know who the real seller is.


----------



## pablo (Aug 6, 2014)

Tesco have 32gb Sandisk Extremes 45mb/s class 10's just now for £20 down from £40 in their bigger stores.
Good buy for reliable authentic cards. Sorry you got stung.


----------



## SilviaLozza (Aug 6, 2014)

Thank you everyone for your support 

I bought a Lexar Professional 64gb 400x 60mb/s for the same price from the Lexar shop on Amazon. I'm definitely going to test it before using it this weekend at a wedding 

I found a nice application that tests the speed of the SD card you want to test, I tried with the fake SanDisk and the maximum writing speed was 16 Mb/s! So that explains why the video were corrupted!

Also, the label was not properly attached, so that is another red flag...

Than I went to check on the amazon comments\reviews for this kind of SD card, and lots of people reported the same problem as me and found out it is because the card is fake... Lesson lernt, always check the reviews! (I don't always do that...now I'll do!!)

I completely agree on buying stuff from brand shops online or physical shops.


----------



## paulsandy85 (Aug 20, 2014)

I hope this video tutorial will be helpful for you to repair your damaged MOV files. Watch it here, http://youtu.be/QfvQ_HXQmmM


----------



## ifp (Aug 20, 2014)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> That's a story that is all too common.
> 
> I prefer to buy cards from a reputable camera store, but will buy ones that are sold by Amazon, but not a third party unless its a store I know. Adorama, for example, sells on Amazon, but not thru the Amazon Prime.
> 
> Chinese sellers are getting clever, and shipping stock to Amazon to sell on their Prime program. Most of them are honest, but counterfeit batteries and flash cards are so common in China that it can be difficult for a buyer to know who the real seller is.



This is good advice. If you're buying anything that could have a counterfeit issue on Amazon, make sure it's shipped from and sold by Amazon.


----------



## hgraf (Aug 20, 2014)

SilviaLozza said:


> Thank you everyone for your support
> 
> I found a nice application that tests the speed of the SD card you want to test, I tried with the fake SanDisk and the maximum writing speed was 16 Mb/s! So that explains why the video were corrupted!



Actually, while contributing perhaps to the problem, it's likely not the main cause.

"fake" cards often compromise in two ways (assuming they work at all): speed and capacity.

It's very common for say a 16GB "fake" card to actually be a 2GB die, rigged in such a way that the OS THINKS it's a 16GB card (very easy to do if you've got access to the firmware for the cards controller, it simply responds that is has more sectors then it actually does).

The result is a card that "works", until you fill it beyond a certain limit. After that the card will continue to report it's writing data, but any read back will be zero.

I believe this is why ONE of your files was partially recoverable, part of that file was written to space that existed, the other part was written to space that doesn't, resulting in a partial recovery. The other files were exclusively written to space that doesn't exist, so they are unfortunately go forever.

It's a very insidious way of doing things because the cards appear to function completely normally, as the file system is written to problems get more and more common.


----------



## iigiig16 (Jun 16, 2015)

SilviaLozza said:


> Hello everyone!
> This is my first topic so nice to meet you!
> 
> I'm a videographer based in London, to film I use a Canon 600D with different lenses and SD cards, generally Kingston and Sandisk.
> ...


Hi, I know this is an old topic but here is a workaround that worked for me:
I have the same 600d camera - Instead of copying the files using the USB cable I just removed the SD card and inserted it in my computer and then copied it.
result - not a single file was corrupted!
I have magic lantern installed but not sure if this is related.


----------



## Tinky (Jun 16, 2015)

hope you got it fixed, my 600d was stable with sandisks, so sorry to hear about this..


are you using canon original batteries or clones? I used energisers and they would deplete very suddenly in video mode and very occassionally crash the current file.

Let us know of any fix you've found. I echo the sentiment of using a caed reader. less links in chain.


----------

