Corrupted frames
Also known as: frame corruption, video glitches
Individual frames arriving damaged, showing blocks, smears or displaced strips, while the rest of the clip plays perfectly normally.
Updated
What it means
Corrupted frames are localised damage inside an otherwise valid file. A few frames carry wrong data and appear as blocks of colour, torn strips or a smear of the previous image, and then the clip recovers.
The pattern follows how video is compressed. A damaged keyframe spoils everything depending on it until the next one, so one bad frame can produce a second of visible mess rather than a single flicker.
The appearance is similar to Macroblocking from heavy compression, but the cause is different: this is data that went wrong on the way to the card rather than detail the encoder chose to discard.
How it works in practice
Checking a session by scrubbing rather than by playing catches it. Damage lasting under a second is easy to miss at speed and obvious when stepping through the suspect region.
Where only a few frames are affected, cutting around them is the practical fix. Trimming to the next clean keyframe loses a fraction of a second and nothing else.
Re-encoding the clip can also hide isolated damage by blending it, though Frame blending is a cosmetic answer rather than a recovery of anything that was lost. The frames are still wrong, merely less obviously so.
What to watch out for
A card at fault usually produces more damage later, so treating the symptom and continuing to record on it is how a whole session gets lost rather than a few frames.
Damage concentrated at the end of clips points at power rather than the card, because a camera browning out writes rubbish for a moment before it stops. That pattern usually arrives alongside a Camera crash file on the same session.
Counterfeit or failing cards show it first at high bit rates, which means the highest quality settings reveal the problem while a lower SD card speed class test suggests everything is fine.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are checked for damaged frames before anything is scored, and a stretch containing them is weighted down so the cut avoids it. Where damage sits at a clip boundary, the trim simply moves past it.