I have a Kodak Zi6 Video Camera. It takes pretty decent video but has two annoying quirks: 1) the batteries don’t last very long and 2) the SD card is always having issues.
1) Battery Life
- apparently you can extend battery life if you limit your recordings to under 10 minutes
- don’t playback videos on the device
2) SD Card – I was repeatedly seeing the ! symbol on top of the SD card symbol that is visible on the display when the camera is turned on. When I see this annoying little symbol I can no longer record. This happened to me just as the bike riders from Le Tour de France were zooming by on their bikes. Needless to say I almost threw my camera on the ground. Here’s how I finally fixed the issue:
i. Stick the SD card into your MBP slot. open Finder and look at the folders. Open the .Trashes/501 folder and see if there are trashed movies in there. I had 2GB worth of trashed files. It seems that the movies I was deleting on the camera were being moved into this folder but not being fully deleted off the card.
ii. Move any movies you want to keep onto your desktop. Open up Disk Utility on your MBP and choose to erase the contents of the SD card.
iii. Eject the SD card and stick the card back into the Zi6. Press the stop and play buttons at the same time while turning the camera on. The service menu will now display. Scroll down to the “format” option and chose it. Then choose “D:” You should get a confirmation message when its completed.
iv. Turn the camera off and back on. Voila! The nasty exclamation mark should be gone and you should now be able to record again using that SD card.
