Blackmagic Forum

Put my P4K through its paces on a 8 hr shoot recently. Found some issues with the 8.6 Beta firmware.

1. The camera would occasionally freeze to the point where I couldn't even turn it off. Had to pull the battery. (Thankfully, never lost any footage.)

2. The camera didn't so much freeze (I could still go into the menu and do stuff), but it would fail to start recording until I pulled the battery.

3. REALLY not liking all the new files and folders that are showing up on my CFAST card in support of the new clip review features in the camera. I would LOVE to have some way of disabling that so I got one file per clip...and nothing else. The way it used to be. (Much better for copying the card to Media drives.)

Jim Simon wrote:3. REALLY not liking all the new files and folders that are showing up on my CFAST card in support of the new clip review features in the camera. I would LOVE to have some way of disabling that so I got one file per clip...and nothing else. The way it used to be. (Much better for copying the card to Media drives.)

Oh no. One of the minor things I love about Blackmagic cameras is that when the time comes to copy the footage, all I see on the memory card are the actual clips. No unnecessary fluff.

Any chance you could take a screenshot of what the file structure looks like with the new firmware?

Jim Simon wrote:... 3. REALLY not liking all the new files and folders that are showing up on my CFAST card in support of the new clip review features in the camera. I would LOVE to have some way of disabling that so I got one file per clip...and nothing else. The way it used to be. (Much better for copying the card to Media drives.)

I don't know what you have different there, but FWIW I don't see similar results with my Pocket 4K running beta firmware 8.6. The only files which appear on my CFast 2.0 card (viewing the card's directory on my Mac running MacOS 14.4.1) are the BRAW files, one file per clip. Plus a single "Stills" subdirectory containing BRAW stills I captured.

EDIT: Ah, on my Win10 machine I see the "extra" files (see attached). I formatted my CFast 2.0 card in-camera as ExFAT.

If this is peculiar to the camera app beta, it should be discussed in thread dedicated to the beta:

Camera 8.6 Beta Release Available
https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink/topic? ... source=app

Bartek Podkowa wrote:all I see on the memory card are the actual clips. No unnecessary fluff.

Yeah, I miss that.

There's a duplicate file for every single clip, about 125 KB is size. Plus a new Private Items folder.

Don't need NONE of that to actually work with the media in the NLE. It's just for camera features, which I would happily do without to make those files go away.

When copying files from my media cards and drives to my RAID 5 prior to owning DaVinci Resolve, I would only copy the actual media files which can be huge.

I’m not concerned if there are tiny files which enable the cameras to manage selective clip playback in the camera if that was how BMD designed a solution to a problem that was identified many years ago. I trust the method BMD used has merit regardless of how any other camera vendor manages clip playback. Thank you BMD.

rick.lang wrote:I trust the method BMD used has merit

Seeing the result, I don't.