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xTheDreamer's avatar

How to get more recording time with a Sandisk 8GB SDHC Class 4 memory card?

Asked by xTheDreamer (897points) May 14th, 2011

I have a Panasonic Lumix DMZ-ZS3 camera and I use a Sandisk 8GB SDHC Class 4 SD card with it.

I want to shoot some videos with this camera but I’ve noticed that when I have the settings to on Rec Quality: HD, Rec Mode: Motion JPEG I could only record for about 8 minutes only.
When I change the setting from Rec Quality to VGA I’m able to record for 21 minutes.

But the thing is I want to record in HD so that I can upload in HD instead of doing the whole export settings.

So how can I get more recording time with the Rec Quality being HD? I find it quite strange, with a 2gb sd card it can record only 8 minutes and even with an 8gb sd card it’s unable to record longer than 8 minutes.

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5 Answers

Tropical_Willie's avatar

@xTheDreamer You need to get a bigger card. You cannot fit 10 gallons in to a 5 gallon bucket. You have in 8 minutes, at HD, put in about 8 GB.

jerv's avatar

That is why HD is generally considered a bad thing by many people. You really need something much bigger unless you want to do just short clips.

Additionally, HD tends to make people who stream it hit their monthly data transfer cap if they have one pretty quickly, in addition to making people who have less-than-top-tier connections often run into stuttering issues.

But if you insist on HD then your only viable choice is to get a bigger SD card. No matter what, the only way to get under 1GB/minute is to sacrifice quality and render it pointless to record in HD in the first place. The biggest SDHC cards are 32GB (around $100), and I am fairly sure the DMC-ZS3 doesn’t support SDXC cards.

xTheDreamer's avatar

@Tropical_Willie That’s why I found it quite strange that with even a 2gb it only records 8 mins, I thought at least an 8gb would get a bit more out of it.

Tropical_Willie's avatar

@xTheDreamer The 2GB may have had some compression done on it to get 8 minutes on the card.

jerv's avatar

Sounds like it might be a memory addressing thing then. I know that my old Sansa cannot handle micro-SDHC but has no issues with micro-SD, which limits the size of card I can put in. And I think we all know how 32-bit versions of Windows generally don’t handle anything over 4GB of RAM.

My guess is that it may be along those lines, like there is a maximum size per file. In that case then there is nothing you can do except switch cameras. Unless you want to shoot in non-HD.

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