Please Stand By

It happens every once and awhile.

We start doing something we've done countless times, without any issues, only to have something beyond our control change everything. Last weekend, I had one such technical difficulty.

I think I have recording video during a kayak outing down pat: I mount a suction cup to the day pod on my deck, to which I screw on a selfie stick, which in turn has my Insta360 camera attached. I make short recordings throughout the paddle, with an occasional long clip when I want to produce a time-lapse segment.

The only thing I do, in preparation for the trip, is to make sure that the battery is charged up and that any old clips have been moved off the data card. I make sure the camera is ready to go when we start our paddle.

On a paddle a few weeks ago, I accidentally pressed a button that placed the Insta360 camera in a motorcycling mode. I have no idea what this setting does to the camera but because I was on the Ottawa River, I didn't have time to play with the camera to figure out how to cancel the mode.

And because the camera still seemed to be recording correctly, I didn't worry about it.

When we returned home, I was able to change the mode back to normal. I removed the video footage from the camera to make my last YouTube video and assumed all was well.

Last weekend, we met up with some friends to do a paddling trip that DW and I have wanted to try for a while: put our kayaks in the Bonnechere River at Renfrew and travel downstream to the Ottawa River on a one-way trek. Our friends were in a canoe and had never done this trip before, either, and it was a perfect day to go.

Before we headed out on the water, I captured some video footage in the air with my drone. I was able to get the Bonnechere River at the dam and our starting point, as well as some footage of the surrounding area.

But once we were on the river, it was up to my Insta360 X5 to capture the trek to the Bonnechere Falls (which we covered in a video, last year), and from the bottom of the falls to the Horton Boat Launch, where one of our vehicles was waiting for us.

I pulled out the drone again, at the falls, to get more footage from the air.

About 15 to 20 minutes into our paddle, as we were traversing some swifts, my camera, which was capturing the action, turned off. Because I was navigating the water and not looking at the camera, I don't know why it turned off: I just heard the jingle that it makes as it's powering down.

We paddled some more and when we approached the Highway 17 overpass, I pressed the record button on the camera. This time, I was watching the camera as it gave me a message that the micro SD card was full, and it shut down again.

I was perplexed. The night before, as I was setting out my camera and drone gear for the next day, I confirmed that there were no video files on the camera. The card was large enough to hold a couple of kayaking outings but I had already removed the clips from our Duck Islands paddle.

The card should have had plenty of storage space.

Looking at the micro SD card when I returned home, it had used only 17.73 GB of its 256 GB capacity. There was plenty of room on the card, so why had it stopped recording?

When DW and I cycled the Petit Train du Nord trail, over four days, I had used the same camera and the same card. I had about 150 clips recorded and had no trouble at all (and I hadn't activated a motorcycle mode).

What had changed?

I have since removed the files from the micro SD card and placed them in a project folder for my next video. DW captured some of our paddle on her smartphone—my smartphone doesn't have enough storage space to capture video (that's another story) so I captured a bunch of stills and a couple of eight-second video clips—so we'll hopefully have enough footage to make a worthwhile video.

After I moved the video files to the storage folder, I deleted the files from the micro SD card before going to the trash can on my MacBook and emptying it. When I emptied the folder, I discovered that there were 248 files in the trash can.

I wondered: if I delete files from the storage space, does the trash can hold them and not allow me to overwrite them? Was the micro SD card full of files in the trash can, and did those files prevent me from recording new footage?

I'm new to Mac. I don't know about such things. When I worked with my Windows-based computer, I could cut and paste files, which removed them from the source storage space: on a Mac, I have to copy and paste, and then move files to the trash.

Does the trash can eat up space on the card and prevent new files from being added? If so, that's a major flaw in the Mac system.

I did some research and yeah, that seems to be the case. When you move files to the trash on a Mac, they are held in something called a .Trashes folder. This folder takes up space on the SD card and for some strange reason, you cannot overwrite the files in this folder.

To me, I shouldn't move anything to the trash can unless I plan to empty the can right away. Like I said, to me, this is a flaw.

Further research taught me that cutting and pasting, in Windows, automatically deletes the file on the source card, not requiring a user to empty the trash. To me, this is the intuitive, logical approach.

This is just one more thing that I need to do when using my MacBook. One more extra step in a growing list of unnecessary steps.

This technical glitch that I experienced on the Bonnechere paddle has also taught me that I shouldn't rely on my former tried-and-true methods for obtaining video on kayak treks. I still have my Insta360 X3 camera, which has never failed me: I should always carry it as a backup.

Of course, going forward, I'll always have to make sure its SD card has the trash emptied, but if other technical difficulties arise—like, I hit a button that changes the recording mode and I can't change it back from inside my kayak—I can simply swap out the cameras.

As for making a Bonnechere River video, please stand by.