ARRI Forum

Hi All,
I don't see a way to delete anything besides the "last clip" on the camera, unless you want to format and delete everything. Am I missing something or is there a reason why we can't just delete any clips on the card? Would anyone else like to have this ability? From time to time I need to make space by deleting a clip from a few clips back, without deleting the last clip. A few times I've also forgotten to format a card and started shooting, and wanted to just go back and delete the clips from the previous shoot, without deleting the new clips.
Cheers!

Dear Noah,

so far the "not delete" policy has been there since day one on the ALEXA cameras. I guess this derived way back in the age of film, when the digital negative was considered the holy grail and besides the darkness and the lab intern nobody was allowed to touch that.

Since we're seeing our user-base to change and also the projects they are shooting (and with that the shooting style) that's a valid idea. I'll forward it to our PMs.

Cheers,
Jan

The other reason is probably because, as I understand it, modern flash memory cards have a lot of internal housekeeping and overhead to write files.

Deleting a file "in the middle", and then writing in the now free space is not as simple as it seems, and can be much slower than erasing the whole card and starting fresh. Using that space in the middle can be much slower than fresh writes, as I recall. And then you run into framerate/codec/resolution dropped frames, etc etc.

Again, as I recall. Not an expert.

Yep, its a technical limitation due to our UDF formatting and write pattern.

Best,
Jan

Good to know, Thanks!