Temporary (possible) bug report with test approachI ran into a sever and reproducible memory management bug in BlackMagic Camera 1.2.00076 and iOS 17.2, during the promised tests.
I will document both the tests results and create a separate bug entry on the Forum. That will take some time (some 150GB of files are involved, so…
You can help tracking the bug already now, if you’ve used Blackmagic Camera recently, and AFTER a phone restart and AFTER an iOS update.
1. Note Blackmagic Camera App version.
2. Note iOS version
3. Go into your local Blackmagic Camera folder, and get all file seizes present, or make a new recording of some size (GB should suffice, more is better).
4. Make a screen dump of your remaining memory (Settings, General, Memory (whatever it’s called in your memory) display on the iPhone.
5. Delete everything (maybe copy to external disk before deletion) via the Blackmagic interface (IMPORTANT).
6. Make a screen dump of your remaining memory (Settings, General, Memory (whatever it’s called in your memory) display on the iPhone.
7. Do you see a significant lowering of memory used?
8. Wait ten minutes. How’s the memory status now?
9. Restart your iPhone (power off followed by power on), login etc.
10. Make a screen dump of your memory status.
11. Now… compare the screen dumps.
I ran into a case, where I recorded around 100GB of video internally (leaving around 50GB free). Copied out the content, and then deleted the internal video via the Blackmagic Camera interface. Files were deleted (missing in both the Blackmagic Camera and the iPhone Blackmagic Folder).
I then started another test, with a different setup (tripod) planning to make a similar 15 minute recording (expecting 110GB). After exactly 7 minutes I wanted to make temperature checks, but Blackmagic had stopped recording with an unknown error. Hmm…
No files shown via Blackmagic Camera interface, but both a video file and a proxy file (around 42GB combined), were found in the Blackmagic folder, when viewed from Files.
The memory status was down to around 5 GB free out of 256GB.
In effect, combined recording in the two tests (plus any prior recordings deleted via the Blackmagic interface since the most recent iPhone restart/update) were still present, as far as iOS was concerned.
I copied out the ~42GB video file, and deleted the recording via the Blackmagic interface.
Powered down the phone. Powered up again, logged in, an went into Settings, General and Memory (whatever it's called in your system).
Over the next few minutes, the system use grows a bit, after getting all internal processes up and running. That was around 70GB used out of 256GB.
Conclusion: Various experiments, recordings and tests plus the last three test files (around 150GB in total), had accumulated as “in use” AFTER being deleted via the Blakcmagic Interface, but the system status not being aware of that (seems that size of proxy deletions are registered correctly though).
The short version: If you’ve used Blackmagic for internal recordings, and deleted the content (after copy out to disk, Air Drop etc), the memory may still be reserved in the system.
If this is not a bug in iOS 17.2 (that does not recognize any difference between Proxy video files and the actual video files, when they’re deleted), then manually delete files via the iPhone Files App. Haven’t tested that yet, since the 180GB or so of files have now been permanently removed through several restarts of my system.
IF you can reproduce the problem (locally on-phone recorded video files deleted via the Blackmagic Camera User interface, are not reflected in system memory status), please confirm here, and in the bug report forum.
A far more thorough report will follow. The bug may be in Blackmagic Camera, iOS 17(.2) or caused by a side effect from the use of 25fps at 1/25s or 50fps at 1/50s. I cannot say, what is the cause with any certainty right now, but if you can reproduce the problem using your own standard settings for internal video recordings, instead of my "as/inspirational" test shenanigans, the cause is quickly narrowed down.
This is just a heads-up on the problem, and a possible approach for checking, if you're affected by the problem, when using Blackmagic Camera App for internal recordings.
Regards and remember, that not only the world can be a cruel master