Panasonic's P2 Card and the Format Error!

Hopefully you'll never see this:

The error message blinks which is why it looks faded here.

It's a FORMAT ERROR! (I think it actually reads "FORMAT ERR!") which can occur very rarely on P2 cards for seemingly no reason. Recently we had one while on location.

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.

Now this camera and another we've been using have had Firewire issues in the past. Namely extremely slow and getting slower over time Firewire transfers. Resetting the cameras and restoring the Firmware seems to have no effect. 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.

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. While slow -as expected- it was going and I told everyone to take a coffee break while it copied over.

About 400MBs into the copy there was a Finder Read/Write error, I didn't have permission for something or other and it konked out. I suspect it was something to do with the "LASTCLIP.TXT" file which is locked by default.

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.

Powering it back on I saw the dreaded "FORMAT ERROR!" in red on the screen.

Now this is a very rare error and unfortunately there's not much you can do about it on location. 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. I'm reluctant to have the Mac do anything to the cards but we were desperate and the director said go ahead so I tried a few repairs with the Terminal and Disk Repair but nothing seemed to help.

We ended up calling and overnighting the card to Panasonic who was able to recover the footage in their labs. They copied the footage back to the same card of ours and shipped it back to us. Panasonic was amazing, fast and helpful.

So the bottom line solution for us, upon seeing FORMAT ERROR! was to just ship the card to Panasonic and have them recover the footage.

My new rules for loading footage from a P2 card when you have to use the camera as a reader is to:

1. Lock the card with the write protect switch before mounting it on the Mac.
2. NEVER use Firewire. USB only from now on.

Improperly Ripped DVD's

There are two errors you may see when you try and play an improperly ripped DVD, an improperly ripped DVD disc image or an improperly ripped VIDEO_TS folder with Apple's DVD Player .app.

1. "There was a problem opening the media. The media type is not supported."

2. "DVD Player encountered an error it could not recover from The disc copy protection could not be verified. The disc cannot be played." (yes it's missing a period in the actual alert box)

The cause of these errors in my case is a client tried to rip one of their companies DVD's which has copy protection and didn't do it correctly. 

Since nothing really surprises me anymore I wasn't alarmed at all (just assumed it wouldn't work) when the DVD the client handed me (a DVD-R) had a .dmg of the DVD they were supposed to give me.

Stranger things have happened. So, On the DVD-R is a rip of the DVD they want me to pull footage from in the form of a .dmg file.

I mount the .dmg and even let it verify and see that it is at least a UDF volume, then, as expected, DVD Player fails to launch. It will play the intro company logos and things then tosses up error #2 up there when it tries to play the menu track.

I'm guessing one of three things happened.

1. They literally made a .dmg from their retail DVD without using a proper ripping tool.

2. They copied the VIDEO_TS folder from a retail disc to their desktop, then used something like Toast to burn it. Again, without using a proper ripping tool.

3. Ripped the DVD somehow and used some app to re-compress it to a DVD-5. And of course never tested the thing.

I'd place my money on #1 this time.

The only option to play it quickly is VLC at this point.

Calling the client (the actual person who contacted me to get this quickie job done for them, btw) and asking "This DVD image you gave me has issues playing. Any idea if I can get a retail version from you?" gets me this pass-the-buck-response, "I wouldn't know. Let me forward you." CLICK then an answering machine for their "media department".

Just for fun I tried copying the VIDEO_TS folder to my desktop and then playing it with DVD Player .app but it was wasn't happening. If I cared just a little bit more I would try ripping the mounted .dmg but I don't.

Luckily I can still use this method to get the few tiny clips they want for their project.

Error Code -50

Sometimes you'll run across this handy error message while trying to copy something to a drive. I have no idea what it means. But I do know that the Finder thinks the drive is still in use by something when in reality it's not.

- lsof | grep in the terminal reveals nothing.
- Using an app like WhatsOpen reveals nothing.
- Relaunching the Finder doesn't help.
- Repairing the drive with Disk Utility won't work because...
- You can't eject the drive.

You have two options in my experience.

A. Force Eject the drive.
B. Restart.

RT Still Cache Error Message

Here's an error message I haven't seen in a while:

This is what you get when you load several hundred images into the timeline at once.