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Author Topic: Zoom F8 - Part 2  (Read 124815 times)

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Offline scorsesefan

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #270 on: April 09, 2016, 04:36:47 PM »

For those of you who didn't noticed this before, or still don't hear it, I suggest you look more deeply into it, as this has been seen by me and other field recordists friends of mine, on two different units, and confirmed by the manufacturer. You might not notice it on set, or might not have the gear to monitor your recordings with the necessary accuracy, but someone in post-production will definitly notice and you might get in trouble. This problem won't show on your wireless mics, but most certainly on your boom mic if it's phantom powered by the F8. So either use an external phantom power supply, or don't touch the trim during recording. Dual channel recording will be very useful if you choose to work without touching the trim knob.

I record loud live music and don't usually change gain settings too much after the first notes of a performance, so I haven't noticed any of these issues on my unit. 

I'm curious if adjusting gain from the IOS app makes any difference.

Good question. I'm on android so I can't test it...

stevetoney

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #271 on: April 09, 2016, 05:34:56 PM »
some fuckin crackhead broke in my house and stole my f8   and of course the 256 g  of memory and the bright orange pelican case


I remember the last 3 of the s/n was 319... can someone post a full s/n  so i can reconstruct it...

B70000282

Offline F.O.Bean

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #272 on: April 09, 2016, 07:25:57 PM »
some fuckin crackhead broke in my house and stole my f8   and of course the 256 g  of memory and the bright orange pelican case


I remember the last 3 of the s/n was 319... can someone post a full s/n  so i can reconstruct it...

B70000282

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Offline mepaca

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #273 on: April 09, 2016, 07:46:14 PM »
Mine is B70000231. The s/n is on the box if you still have it. Hopefully the perpetrator will choke to death soon.

stevetoney

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #274 on: May 01, 2016, 01:31:55 PM »
I recorded an all night thing in NOLA called the Bayou Rendezvous and experienced my first ever glitch using the F8 in probably around 100 recordings.  That's the bad news...the good news is that the machine design saved me from losing anything.  Here are the details.

So I was recording a thing during Jazz Fest where the music started at 9:30pm and ran until daylight the following morning.  I set up my Zoom F8 with external Tekkeon batteries on both the 12V connector and the hirose connector.  Both Tekkeon's were set to 12V.  Plenty of juice to last the whole night, so I just set it up at the beginning of the night and let it roll, only checking every so often to make sure everything was still OK.  No problems were visually observed while recording...good levels all night long, no power losses, etc.

However, when I started to master the recordings, it turns out that two of the files on one of my two cards have some strange issues.  See the screen shots below.  Notice that in the first screen shot, the left channel goes bad randomly part way into the file.  Then when a new file is automatically started (see the second screen shot), the left channel is OK...but strangely the right channel goes bad right at the end of file. 

This is the first file...the left channel brick goes all the way 'till the 2:04 mark, which is where a new file is automatically created. 


Then this is the file that was created after the previous file was saved.  Strangely, the brick no longer exists on the left channel but started up again on the right channel (and not on the left) a ways into this file.  This recording was the last act of the night, so fortunately the second brick happened just before I stopped recording for the evening.


OK, so again that's the bad news.  It would be nice to know what happened to cause this, but at the point I have no clue.  It happened on a card that's performed flawlessly since I first got the F8.  The card isn't on the official approved cards list, but since its worked fine for me, I haven't worried that its not on the list.  It's a Sandisk Ultra Plus 128GB microSDXC card in an SD card adapter.  I just ran it through the F8 performance test this morning and it checks out OK.  The card was in Slot 1 of the F8.  It wasn't freshly formatted, but the format had been performed only one show previously so only about 5GB of space had been used on it.

And here's the good news.  Since the F8 has two card slots, I was also recording the same data onto the second card.  When I loaded those files into my DAW, here's what I got...




So the good news is that my data was properly saved onto the card in Slot 2 even though something was wrong with the files that were saved to the card in slot 1.

Finally and interestingly, I had also saved the L/R tracks onto the same card that the glitchy files were saved to.  Here's what the L/R files looked like!




So as you can see, even though L/R got recorded at the same time as the glitchy files, they saved just fine.

The moral of this story seems to be to take advantage of the backing-up capabilities provided with this recorder.  The glitchy files were during a set that I thought was smokin' so the backups really saved me from the disappointment of losing one of the channels of a great set of music.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2016, 01:36:27 PM by tonedeaf »

Offline tgakidis

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #275 on: May 01, 2016, 01:37:30 PM »
This happened to me last weekend also using a scandisk 128 class 10. Like you I had a second sd card as s back up.  I was planning to post to the group but hadn't got around to it.  I plan on running smaller cards hoping that this won't happen again.
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Offline Sebastian

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #276 on: May 01, 2016, 03:35:18 PM »
As the other card is fine, it's pretty clear that the problem occurred when writing to the SD card. I would expect the recorder to inform the user about write errors, not continue to write an unusable file. Have any of you reached out to Zoom about this? This could actually be a bug.

Offline acidjack

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #277 on: May 01, 2016, 05:01:48 PM »
I also had an odd one -- two cards in, second card was set to "primary" by mistake. Second card ran out. First card didn't write until second card died. Not how it's supposed to work. I didn't lose any music, but it was odd. Has happened twice.
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stevetoney

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #278 on: May 01, 2016, 05:56:15 PM »
As the other card is fine, it's pretty clear that the problem occurred when writing to the SD card. I would expect the recorder to inform the user about write errors, not continue to write an unusable file. Have any of you reached out to Zoom about this? This could actually be a bug.

I'll send Zoom a summary.  One thing I didn't mention in the post above is that I recorded Tracks 1 and 2 as mono files.  What I showed a screen shot of was after I'd joined the mono files together in Audition.

Offline tgakidis

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #279 on: May 01, 2016, 06:15:54 PM »
I recorded in stereo and both channels were bricked
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Offline voltronic

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #280 on: May 01, 2016, 08:33:50 PM »
Not trying to turn this into another recorder discussion thread where everyone just talks about card write errors (please, no more!), but here are a few things I thought of to possibly narrow down the issue.  Note that I don't own an F8, but am strongly considering one in the future if and when they make an Android version of the remote app.

For those who have had this happen:

1. Did the error happen on an off-list card?  (Sub-question: Do you think the on-board test app can be trusted to thoroughly test card performance to the level Zoom is testing cards themselves?)
2. Was the offending card in Slot 1 and/or set to Primary?
3. If the second card wrote a good file where the first glitched, was the second card an approved card?

I also would think there should be an on-screen notification of a write error, but maybe you'd have to be watching the screen when the error occurred.  I'm not sure if Sebastian is suggesting that recording should have stopped upon the write error occurring, but IMO, it's a good thing that the unit continued to write (to both cards) because otherwise you wouldn't have gotten your whole show.  Even if the second one had a glitch at a different time you could still paste together a clean take from both cards as long as they didn't go bad in the same place.
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stevetoney

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #281 on: May 01, 2016, 09:46:58 PM »
1. Did the error happen on an off-list card?  (Sub-question: Do you think the on-board test app can be trusted to thoroughly test card performance to the level Zoom is testing cards themselves?)

Neither of my cards were on the list.  (I have no idea about the answer to your second question.)

2. Was the offending card in Slot 1 and/or set to Primary?

Yes and yes.

3. If the second card wrote a good file where the first glitched, was the second card an approved card?

No my second card is an el cheapo but I've used it since the start without any issues.  The second card I use doesn't even pass the performance test (Patriot LX series).  That said, since it doesn't pass the performance test, my expectation is that it's not fast enough to keep up with the Zoom in case I were ever to have ten channels of data being written to it...Channels 1 through 8, plus L/R.  The most I've done so far is six...four mics plus L/R and both of my cards handled that situation fine.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2016, 09:48:52 PM by tonedeaf »

Offline F.O.Bean

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #282 on: May 02, 2016, 12:21:11 AM »
1. Did the error happen on an off-list card?  (Sub-question: Do you think the on-board test app can be trusted to thoroughly test card performance to the level Zoom is testing cards themselves?)

Neither of my cards were on the list.  (I have no idea about the answer to your second question.)

2. Was the offending card in Slot 1 and/or set to Primary?

Yes and yes.

3. If the second card wrote a good file where the first glitched, was the second card an approved card?

No my second card is an el cheapo but I've used it since the start without any issues.  The second card I use doesn't even pass the performance test (Patriot LX series).  That said, since it doesn't pass the performance test, my expectation is that it's not fast enough to keep up with the Zoom in case I were ever to have ten channels of data being written to it...Channels 1 through 8, plus L/R.  The most I've done so far is six...four mics plus L/R and both of my cards handled that situation fine.


Thanks for the info! Very strange ??? I wish the 70d had a 2nd SD slot like the F8, just in case this ever happened! But to me it sounds like there is a bug somewhere in there since it happened to a few of you!
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Offline Sebastian

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #283 on: May 04, 2016, 06:19:45 AM »
I'm not sure if Sebastian is suggesting that recording should have stopped upon the write error occurring, but IMO, it's a good thing that the unit continued to write (to both cards)

No. I think the F8 should inform the user that there has been a write error on card 1, but card 2 is still fine. With two cards, there's not much of a problem since the recording can be restored from the other card. But if you're only recording to one card to begin with, it could be a problem if the recorder seems to continue recording just fine, while in fact what is being recorded is white noise.

stevetoney

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Re: Zoom F8 - Part 2
« Reply #284 on: May 04, 2016, 10:57:24 AM »
I'm not sure if Sebastian is suggesting that recording should have stopped upon the write error occurring, but IMO, it's a good thing that the unit continued to write (to both cards)

No. I think the F8 should inform the user that there has been a write error on card 1, but card 2 is still fine. With two cards, there's not much of a problem since the recording can be restored from the other card. But if you're only recording to one card to begin with, it could be a problem if the recorder seems to continue recording just fine, while in fact what is being recorded is white noise.

Has there ever been a recorder that does this?  Just curious if this is even possible.

 

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