Best CFast Card for BM6K Pro

Based on your experience, what is the most reliable CFast card for the money for the 6K Pro?

There is no such thing as most reliable, only reasonably reliable as a generality of anything electronic or mechanical, depending on handling and use.

Here’s my 3 top ones per experience on the Pocket 6K and URSA Mini Pro 4.6K G2
1. Angelbird
2. SandDisk Extreme Pro
3. Komputerbay - I have been using mine for many years now and it has not given up on me.

I have not used it but I have also heard that Wise is reliable as well.

The Angelbird has the fastest sustained recording specs, but my Wise cards (and Wise single/dual card readers) have never failed me over the years if operated within their specs. Mind you I’m only recording productions at 30 fps or 24 fps.

From my personal experience I can highly recommend SandDisk Extreme Pro, same cards even heavily used sins 2018 and not one card has ever given me a problem.
Angelbird cards seams to be good ones, I have not had any problem using them, not had them for long time but not herd of any long term users having any issue using them.

I’ve used EGODISK and ProGrade for years and never had issues.
These two 256GB CFast 2.0 cards have lasted through three cameras without issue.

I have BMPCC 6K G2. I have two CFast 2.0 cards. I fully recommend Angelbird (512 MB in my case). It never failed to me.

And I do not recommend Wise (1 TB in my case). It either starts recording and fails immediately, or records without issues. And this behaviour looks random. It fails randomly at 6K, compression rate 8:1, 25 FPS. And the bit rate is lower than the guaranteed 130 MB/sec in this case. Or sometimes records without issues at compression rate 5:1.

And Angelbird cards are only slightly more expensive than Wise cards.

… I do not recommend Wise (1 TB in my case). It either starts recording and fails immediately, or records without issues. And this behaviour looks random. It fails randomly at 6K..:

And Angelbird cards are only slightly more expensive than Wise cards.

That’s certainly not reliable. You might reach out to Wise-Advanced Support. It could be that your cards require a card firmware update as occasionally that change does occur. I believe the cards may need to be returned to Wise-Advanced.

I have sent a message to Wise-Advanced asking if their firmware updates can be performed by computer download via connection to a card reader?

That’s certainly not reliable. You might reach out to Wise-Advanced Support.

I have sent an e-mail to Wise-Advanced Support. No response from them. I did not expect miracles from their side but at least they could respond.

I received a reply from Wise-Advanced Support and they confirmed my firmware is current for all of my several Wise media cards and the Portable SSD 1 TB drive.

Today I repeated my BMPCC4K stress tests using the Wise SSD 1 TB card shooting 4K 60 fps with BRAW Q0, BRAW 3:1, and ProRes HQ and had no dropped frames.

It may be there’s an issue on the BMPCC6K, but I can’t test that.

That’s certainly not reliable. You might reach out to Wise-Advanced Support.

I have sent an e-mail to Wise-Advanced Support. No response from them. I did not expect miracles from their side but at least they could respond.

Hi,
I think that the mystery of my Wise CFast 2.0 1 TB card failures can be explained.
First, I contacted the Wise-Advanced Support. They told me that the camera may not provide enough power to the card. They offered me to replace this card with two 512 GB cards that supposedly does not have this issue.
And I followed their hint regarding power and I found that this card is more reliable when I do not use the viewfinder on the camera. The viewfinder consumes a couple of watts, so it makes sense.
So, without the viewfinder I could record 6K, 25 FPS with the compression rate 3:1. Which is enough for me.
But well, for 6K, 50 FPS the situation is not so rosy: I could record at the compression rate 12:1. This is not enough for me, the competition offers higher recording speeds.
And when I powered the camera either with a DC adapter or using the battery grip, I had no issues even when the viewfinder was attached.
But well, I need the viewfinder when I shoot outdoors.

I hope that what I wrote is helpful.

Thanks for that feedback on the Wise CFast2 1 TB. Works well for me on the BMPCC4K but the BMPCC6K Pro has the ability to draw more power and cause an issue.

I rely on the Angelbird cards. So far they’ve been reliable and fast cards, and uses less power than other cards like the SanDisk Extreme for example. So I have 4 256Gbs of them that I’ve been using for a while now. I needed another 1Tb this coming weekend. So last Friday, B&H had the 1Tb for $799 and the 512Gb for $399. But at Adorama I found the 2 pack 512gb for the URSA and they cost $799. However they were on sale for $499, a savings of $300. I ordered it and it arrived yesterday. I’m testing them in prep for the weekend. If you are looking for a good deal on Angelbird 1Tb (2 x 512Gb), this is pretty good savings. I’m not sure how long this will last… maybe a few days or a week.

I've decided to exchange my unopened SanDisk Extreme PRO 512GB CFast 2.0 card for the Angelbird 512GB AV Pro CFast 2.0 card. The Angelbird has a faster read and write speed, and is only $40 more expensive.

LOL on this post.

I'd been getting by with a couple of ProGrade 256 cards for a while now. I often had to resort to USB drives for longer shoots, but like the idea of less complex rigs. So I got a 1TB Angelbird card a few months back.

A couple of weeks back on an important shoot, after each day of shooting, we'd return to our office where we would download all footage then reformat all the media in the camera for the next days work. Sounds familiar right? On the second day of this particular shoot, when we put the card into the card reader, nothing. It came up blank... couldn't even see the card. Tried it over and over... different cables, ports, computers, etc. Nothing. Fairly distressing as you can imagine. When you add up all the talent, staff, crew, and agency staff, etc for each day of shooting it quickly got to be pretty expensive fast and losing a day's shoot was going to cost.

So I went to the Angelbird website where on the support page there is a section called something like "Don't worry, we have your back". The project I was working on had a fairly tight deadline. So I filled out a form from the Angelbird support website and asked that I be called quickly. I think I did that a couple of times as I was a little freaked out. I received a call the next morning from a rep in the US. She communicated with staff in Austria. Angelbird arranged overnight shipping of the card to their office's in Austria. I was told that the process took about 15 days or so and that they had a fairly high chance of recovering data. I asked that they move faster please. To keep it all transparent I informed the agency CD what was happening who took it all in stride. At the end of the day they were able to download all the files and uploaded to a portal I provided with MASV. The process took about 7-8 days total. I asked the reason for the issue and they suggested it might be the card reader and suggested I buy one of theirs, which I did (had been using a ProGrade). But they were not positive. They also replaced the card within a couple more days.

It all worked out. Even though it was stressful, they understood what I was going through and were very nice to work with. The client remained calm through the whole thing as well. Still, I hope that it doesn't happen again.

In the film days I remember going to the lab one morning to have the lab owner come out and tell me there had been a mistake with all the overnight processing, can't remember exactly why. They were completely honest. It was a mistake someone made. They had been our E-6 lab for years and were totally reliable. We lost something like 100 sheets of film. Fortunately it was only a day of tabletop shooting, which we were able to easily re-shoot. All the other car and people shooters didn't fair so well that morning.

So what's the moral of the story. Things happen. It's not a perfect world. But it's still turning... LOL.

I asked the reason for the issue and they suggested it might be the card reader and suggested I buy one of theirs, which I did (had been using a ProGrade). But they were not positive. They also replaced the card within a couple more days.

I have an Angelbird card reader and a SanDisk reader as well. There are certain cards like the KomputerBay that it will not recognize at all, but the SanDisk will. Of course both card readers recognizes Angelbird and SanDisk media.

So as you said, the moral is things happen and this one is one that is hard to explain and difficult when you depend on something that can fail. Glad to know Angelbird has good support; but better yet is to have consistently working products.

LOL on this post.

I'd been getting by with a couple of ProGrade 256 cards for a while now. I often had to resort to USB drives for longer shoots, but like the idea of less complex rigs. So I got a 1TB Angelbird card a few months back.

A couple of weeks back on an important shoot, after each day of shooting, we'd return to our office where we would download all footage then reformat all the media in the camera for the next days work. Sounds familiar right? On the second day of this particular shoot, when we put the card into the card reader, nothing. It came up blank... couldn't even see the card. Tried it over and over... different cables, ports, computers, etc. Nothing. Fairly distressing as you can imagine. When you add up all the talent, staff, crew, and agency staff, etc for each day of shooting it quickly got to be pretty expensive fast and losing a day's shoot was going to cost.

So I went to the Angelbird website where on the support page there is a section called something like "Don't worry, we have your back". The project I was working on had a fairly tight deadline. So I filled out a form from the Angelbird support website and asked that I be called quickly. I think I did that a couple of times as I was a little freaked out. I received a call the next morning from a rep in the US. She communicated with staff in Austria. Angelbird arranged overnight shipping of the card to their office's in Austria. I was told that the process took about 15 days or so and that they had a fairly high chance of recovering data. I asked that they move faster please. To keep it all transparent I informed the agency CD what was happening who took it all in stride. At the end of the day they were able to download all the files and uploaded to a portal I provided with MASV. The process took about 7-8 days total. I asked the reason for the issue and they suggested it might be the card reader and suggested I buy one of theirs, which I did (had been using a ProGrade). But they were not positive. They also replaced the card within a couple more days.

It all worked out. Even though it was stressful, they understood what I was going through and were very nice to work with. The client remained calm through the whole thing as well. Still, I hope that it doesn't happen again.

In the film days I remember going to the lab one morning to have the lab owner come out and tell me there had been a mistake with all the overnight processing, can't remember exactly why. They were completely honest. It was a mistake someone made. They had been our E-6 lab for years and were totally reliable. We lost something like 100 sheets of film. Fortunately it was only a day of tabletop shooting, which we were able to easily re-shoot. All the other car and people shooters didn't fair so well that morning.

So what's the moral of the story. Things happen. It's not a perfect world. But it's still turning... LOL.

Thanks for telling this story, Marshall!

A related question: are folks formatting their CFast cards 'Exfat' or for 'Mac OS' when shooting with a 6K Pro? My editing platform will be DaVinci Resolve.

A related question: are folks formatting their CFast cards 'Exfat' or for 'Mac OS' when shooting with a 6K Pro? My editing platform will be DaVinci Resolve.

Personally I am using exFAT only. If you are on a Apple computer then you could choose MacOS for formatting, but if you have to hand over your media to others, exFAT will be more universal.