Read the manual! May 1, 2012

As I noted in my previous post, I was at WCWP’s first annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony Thursday night at LIU Post.

What I didn’t tell you was I brought my recently purchased JVC Everio GZ-HM320 HD camcorder to record the ceremony, which lasted about an hour, in addition to candid chatter before and afterward.

Unfortunately, I didn’t read the camcorder’s manual when I bought it in October.  After a few successful, short test recordings in October and November, I didn’t use it until Thursday night.  I was able to get two minutes of chatter and the first nine minutes of the ceremony, but then, the memory card stopped working.  Everything recorded after LIU Post Provost Dr. Paul Forestell talked about when he first met WCWP station manager Dan Cox was corrupted and could not be viewed or recovered.  At least I had the pictures I shot on my digital camera.

My first reaction the following day when I learned of the file corruption was to look for a better camcorder with internal memory of at least 32 GB (gigabytes).  But tonight, it finally dawned on me that it wasn’t the camcorder that was the problem.  It was the memory card: a Kingston Class 4 SDHC 32 GB card.  Before I considered buying a SanDisk card of the same class and size, I looked at my camcorder’s manual.

In the middle of page 9, it said “operations are confirmed on … Panasonic, TOSHIBA, SanDisk [and] ATP” cards.  For video, “Class 4 or higher compatible SDHC card (4 GB to 32 GB).”  And then, the money quote: “Using cards other than those specified above may result in recording failure or data loss.”  Bingo!

So, I went ahead and bought that SanDisk card to replace the Kingston.  If I get uninterrupted video for more than ten minutes the next I record an event like the WCWP Hall of Fame ceremony, I’ll know I made the right decision.  And I’ll save a ton of money.

The moral is simple: Read the manual!

5/3 UPDATE: The SanDisk card arrived this afternoon.  Putting it in did the trick!  My camcorder successfully recorded about an hour and a half of video while I went to and from Sunrise Mall (Westfield Sunrise) in East Massapequa.  There was no corruption; all files (3.89 GB at a time) played and could be scrolled through in Windows Media Player.
I also tested my Tascam DR-03 audio recorder while I was out.  It recorded the same length of time as the camcorder successfully with a SanDisk 16 GB microSDHC card.