Just Reported: First Case of Corrupt Video from Canon EOS-1D C

I have finally managed to put my hands on corrupt footage coming from new flagship Canon camera.
Canon claims that its EOS-1D C is the first 4K resolution DSLR camera.

I have examined the damaged footage: video is actually encoded in Motion JPEG, 4096 x 2160 and audio is in Linear PCM 16 bits.
At almost 3 MB per frame, the camera has to write its 4K/24p footage at an astonishing speed of 500 Mbits/s. Needless to say, the fastest CompactFlash cards in the market can barely sustain this write speed, and actually the camera uses a Dual CF set-up to cope with that.

Freeze, Zoom, Focus … Read the Newspaper!

4K videos recorded by Canon EOS-1D C produces images so detailed and sharp that you can crop 1% of a frame and still read the newspaper! A Blade Runner-ish performance!

Highlighted image represents just 1% of the original video frame!

Repairing Corrupt 4K Videos

Such demanding bandwidth and storage specs will inevitably cause problems. Corrupt videos will likely be produced by “usual suspects”:

  • lack of space in card
  • lack of speed of card
  • camera failure in hot conditions

At this point there is no evidence that firmware 1.0.2 is responsible of the failure. We will track the failures by firmware versions as we did during Canon 7D epidemic outbreak.

The damaged footage that I have examined comes in a QuickTime MOV file, but without the moov atom at the end since recording did not end gracefully. This missing moov atom should contain the media tables and index that are needed for the video to be playable.

Fortunately, Motion JPEG media is easy to parse, thanks to the markers used to encode the image, in particular FFD8 (start of image) and FFD9 (end of image). With a standard re-indexing technique, we have managed to make the video playable, restoring original quality.

Therefore, as of February 2013…

  • Treasured cannot detect and preview corrupt Canon EOS-1D C videos yet.
    we will try to update Treasured in March with Canon 4K detection and preview.
  • But we can repair Canon 4K videos if you send us a repair request with Treasured.
February 28th, 2013 in 4K and Cinema, Canon, Movie Repair