Memory card full
Also known as: card full, out of space
The moment recording stops because the card has no room left, which in action filming almost always happens during the run that mattered.
Updated
What it means
A full card is a hard stop. The camera keeps running until it cannot, and the file being written ends wherever the space ran out. Whatever came next does not exist.
It is a volume problem rather than a settings one. High Bitrate recording at 4K fills a card faster than most people estimate, and a long day does the rest. The figure on the box is an optimistic one.
The failure is predictable and still catches everyone, because the card fills during the part of the session worth filming. Nothing warns loudly enough to notice mid-run.
How it works in practice
Formatting before every session is the habit that prevents it. Card formatting in camera rather than deleting files keeps the card clean and the free space figure honest and the file index clean.
Two cards beats one large one. Swapping at a natural break gives a backup copy as well as space, and a card that never leaves the camera is a single point of failure.
Checking space is faster than checking settings. A glance at remaining time before a run is the one check that catches both a full card and a wrong Frame rate (fps).
What to watch out for
Loop recording hides the symptom and creates another. Loop recording overwrites the oldest footage to keep going, so the card never fills and the morning disappears instead.
The interrupted file is frequently damaged. A recording cut off mid-write can produce a Camera crash file that needs repairing before it opens at all, and the last run is the one inside it.
Deleting in camera to make room during a session is how people lose the wrong clips. Decisions made quickly on a small screen are not the decisions review would have made with time and a bigger screen.
How RawClip handles it
Nothing downstream recovers footage that was never recorded, so the card is the one place where a mistake is permanent. Where a file was cut off mid-write, the readable part is analysed like any other clip and the damaged tail is ignored rather than used.