Today is the first day of shooting for my documentary 4th Estate in the 21st Century; my final project as a Brooks student (not counting the gen eds I have left in May/June). For this project Brooks generously granted me use of one of the new Sony PMW-EX1 cameras the VJ program just bought. Kudos go to Brooks for being on the bleeding edge of technology. The EX1 is a stellar camera that has amazed me left and right with its clean and sharp and nice and tight images (Brooks joke).
Though I've had the camera in my hands off and on over the last couple of months, I haven't had much opportunity to really put it through the paces a VJ student normally would. So today was the first time I'd done any real shooting with the camera. This probably should have been more nerve racking than it was; the first day out with an untested camera that has a reputation (from others, not me) of being finicky and troublesome should not be the first day of shooting on a crucial project. True to the laws of nature, today was the first time I had major issues with the camera.
Prior to today I'd had the occasional goofiness with the auto focus and thrown a couple switches that did things I wasn't expecting, but most of it could be chalked up to user error or ignorance. The manual has been read a couple of times and will probably be read more to figure out how to do everything I need to - this is not a pick it up and us it camera. But everything was eventually figured out and righted. Until today.
Today I had about 15 minutes of footage in the can... er... card. The battery was running low, but I figured I'd get a couple more shots before I switched batteries. Upon entering one of my subjects' office to get some insert shots I plopped down and started recording. Shot one. Cool. Shot two. Cool. Shot three. "Format Card?" was the message I got when going for the third shot. Strange, the card was operating perfectly well until then. Full? Nope. Removed. Inserted. "Format Card?" Hell no! I have footage on there!
After a big of walking back and forth to and from the car to grab my card reader (then realizing once I got back that I'd forgotten my laptop in the car) I managed to dump the card to my hard drives. Crisis mostly averted. I still had this odd message to worry about though. By this time it seemed the camera battery was dead, so I popped another in. No more message. Does fresh battery = card is readable and good? I don't know. Rich Reid had reported the exact same problem but couldn't find a solution. I'll have to ask him if he'd replaced the low battery he was probably using.
Lesson Learned: Keep fresh batteries in the camera at all times!*
*As a footnote I'd like to mention also that the batteries need to be removed anytime the camera isn't in use as just being attached seems to drain them far too quickly.