Today was an important day at the Karate school that I attend. Super Dan, a martial art legend, was coming to the dojo to teach an Arnis/Eskrima seminar. I was tasked with the important job of setting up my GH5S to record the workshop and then walk away and participate. Simple enough – right?
I had taken time this week to study the best settings for the camera in terms of bitrate, color mode, which microphone to use, etc. I even went out and bought a battery grip so that I wouldn’t run out of power. I set up the camera in 4K / 150 Mbps / 8 bit / Rec 709 color / 24p. I used a custom white balance, got the sound dialed in just right, manually focused after setting the proper exposure, set both card slots to automatically change when one filled up, and then walked away. I checked the camera a few times during the seminar and everything was fine.
Half way through the seminar, I checked out the camera again, and all was good. The battery indicator on the monitor showed that the battery was almost exhausted in the grip. By my calculations, if we were half way done, and the battery in the body lasted as long as the one in the grip, all would be fine. Pretty smart!
All was well, but I figured just to be safe, I would swap the battery out of the grip and that way there would be plenty of power. Now, I could have stopped recording and turned off the camera. I should have, but I had this brilliant idea. I could keep recording, take the battery out of the grip, the camera would then switch to the internal battery automatically, and it would keep recording while I hot swapped the battery. Brilliant – right? I proceeded with the battery removal.
The camera turned off when I took the battery out of the grip. I had this terrible sinking feeling. After swapping the battery and turning it back on, I couldn’t play the file that recorded for the last 90 minutes. It just didn’t show up. Well, I got the camera recording again, and left it alone. I assumed that all the settings would have been retained. Wrong!!! Already 30 minutes into the seminar after the break, I realized that the white balance wasn’t retained, nor the sound settings, nor the 4K setting I chose – I didn’t realize that last part until hours later at home!
In addition to the above problems, the initial file of the first half of the seminar that was otherwise perfect, was corrupted! I can’t play it at all! I’m trying all sorts of different ways to “fix” the file, but at the time of this writing, after working on it for hours – it’s no go.
Don’t be like me. Don’t take your battery out while filming. Just don’t.
Do you know about de AC adaptors to get the camera continously running?
Now, but it’s something I’ll be looking into.
There are some ways to fix the file. But they are tricky. Try to google: “Fix .mdt broken file†you will find a couple of anwers for this.
The problem is that the H264 file ended whithout the end of file mark. Till now, none of the available solutions worked perfertly for me. But you can try it.
Good luck!!!