Bad Write to CF card on 7D

<p>Out shooting Eagles this morning. 7D, Canon 500mm f4 with Canon 1.4 extender. All shots RAW. Brite sunshine 60 degrees. Imported to an IMAC using Lightroom3 from a card reader. I used 2 memory cards, both Sandisk, 8 gig extreme III, 30mb/s </p>

<p>Took about 400 shots and several videos. All in all it was an excellent morning shoot with some spectacular results. BUT, of the 400, 15 or so of the shots look like the one attached below. <br>

On the first card, I took about 150 stills and was shooting a video, for perhaps 2 minutes. the video shooting stopped and the camera said it then it could no longer write to the card. I took several more stills, then changed cards. It appears that all the stills were recorded without incident. This card had no video recorded. <br>

On the second card, I took several videos without a problem and they all turned out fine. But that is where the the 200 single picture shots created these 15 miswrites. I looked at the previews in the camera (after import) and none of these showed up as a problem. </p>

<p>I am heading out west to do a month of Desert Photography in two weeks, and wonder if this is just one of those things, or if it might be a Canon problem, a card problem or a lightroom problem. Any input appreciated.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance</p>

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<p>Usually it's a card problem but you can easily eliminate a few variables. Use the USB connection on your 7D to upload to DPP. If they open correctly in DPP, you may have a bad card reader. If it's the same, your card is probably hosed. It's not likely to be a software problem but if the bad files open correctly in DPP, but not in LT, you can suspect Adobe...</p>

<p>Well, unfortunately, I get this as well, about 1% of my downloads look like this. But the good news is that it is not the card (in my case) but the download. If I delete the file and download again it is ok. I take images as RAW+jpg, and this only affects the RAW files. It is only visible in Lightroom if I open the file in the develop mode. That means I can't see this in the preview which is based on the jpg. It only started doing this after I changed my antivirus program to Norton, but that could be a coincidence. I use the internal cardreader on my PC, and have not tried using a different one. If you have the same issue, make sure you check all files in LR before you overwrite the card, and remember that you can't trust the preview.</p>

<p>This is generally user error. I've never had this happen to many tens of thousands of images transferred the past ten years from several digital cams, including 10D, 40D, 7D and others-- to three different PCs too.</p>

<p>1. Always use a card reader; always<br>

2. Use the OS's native copy (create a new folder then drag and drop from the CF reader to your hard drive)<br>

3. Importing from CF cards via editing software is generally dumb<br>

4. Importing directly from the camera hooked via USB is also dumb<br>

5. It's all in the work flow<br>

6. Sometimes shooters exceed their card's capacity<br>

7. Sometimes shooters rarely format their CF cards<br>

8. Sometimes shooters (ghastly!) format the CF card from the PC's OS<br>

9. Sometimes a card is removed while the camera still writing to it.<br>

10. Shooter tries and buys cheap stuff (CF cards) trying to save ten bucks<br>

11. Shooters swap cards among various cameras before downloading (rarely if ever recommended) and not reformatting</p>

<p>*Nearly always* these errors of bad, corrupted image file errors are user originated. Pay attention to perfect workflow and it will never happen.</p>

<p>Even though I *have* had bad writes (less than half a dozen in the last 6 yrs), from one bad sector on one bad card, I think Ken has made some excellent points (whether or not they apply to you) about workflow... a proper accumulation of proper technique will eliminate most problems. </p>

<p>I do have to say that a costly CF card doesn't necessarily mean you are getting a fully functional card. ALWAYS do a capacity burst field test before you start using a card for things that matter (ie. fill it up <em>completely</em> as fast as possible a couple times). Even though 99.9% of cards will perform flawlessly, you want to catch that .1% before it screws up your shoot.</p>

<p>My card reader built into my newer Windows 7/Dell Studio XPS turned out to be my card problem. Somewhat similar. I switched to my old San Disk reader and all my cards/camera are fine now, reads perfectly.</p>

<p>http://www.cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=15384</p>

<p>I have been downloading "many tens of thousands" of images for the past 10 years as well, and never had issues until a few months ago. Also, I use fairly new Sandisk cards, plug them into the reader in my PC, and drag them to the hard disk. Not much chance for user error here.</p>