Your camera media is today’s digital film can: Besides the camera, it's the first link in the chain that makes up your workflow, and it’s therefore invaluable. It’s also, rather conveniently, reliable. But that doesn’t mean it’ll live forever.

To get the most cycles out of your media, your camera media needs regular maintenance. Despite its (often) sturdy physical format, under the hood there’s a lot of movement going on when you record to a camera card. All movement results in wear, even if it’s electrons, and camera cards are no exception. If you don’t take care of your cards, it’ll cost you speed, and eventually lifespan.

With our new OWC integration in OffShoot, you can now measure your card’s health, understand where in its lifespan it’s at, restore it to peak performance when possible, and make sure it's in tip-top shape for your next production.

Healthy media = healthy production

Remember the days when you couldn’t shoot RAW without an external recorder? Thanks to the advent of NAND flash memory, that’s no longer a problem - media has become much faster and reliable. But NAND flash wears with use. The controllers inside your media cards detect that wear and actively work around it, but over time, inefficiencies accumulate.

The impact isn’t just “it’ll just be slower someday” — it results in unpredictable throughput in the moments you least want it: shooting long takes, high-bitrate RAW, multicam days. Think of it like a film can with a sticky latch: most of the time it’s fine, until it happens at the wrong moment.

Workflows live and die by reliability. Cameras expect steady write rates; data wranglers plan for sustained backup speeds; verification and dailies thrive on consistent ingest. If performance becomes a question mark, you get slow offloads and schedule ripple effects that chew through contingency time.

Ultimately, the controllers can no longer cope and you end up with a “bad card”. The card isn’t bad per se; you just didn’t do any maintenance.

Sanitize vs. Secure Erase vs. formatting

Most folks know how to format a card. It’s the easiest way to seemingly empty a card. But that’s all it does - it just tells the card’s file system there are no more references to the data stored on it. The data is still there until it someday gets overwritten.

Because that’s a data leak waiting to happen, many vendors tout a Secure Erase feature. macOS’s Disk Utility and Windows’ DiskPart also offer it, overwriting your drive with bogus data. But that doesn’t help with your card’s performance.

Sanitize trumps all that by returning the NAND to a fresh state. It instructs your card’s controller to reset the media to a near factory-new condition — clearing mapping tables and blocks so future writes are laid down cleanly, restoring maximum sustained write speed and thus improving reliability. It’s not a cosmetic cleanup; it’s a performance reset with true data eradication on top of it.

Innergize

You can’t just sanitize any card - to do so, you’ll need to have to be able to talk to a card’s controller, and only a vendor knows how; they hold the keys to a card’s firmware. Use a vendor’s tool, and you’ll know it’ll do the job. But it’s yet another piece of software. In a world where many people don’t realize card maintenance is a thing, it helps to have such options available where the actual work happens: within OffShoot.

OWC builds media and readers for the kinds of sets where “good enough” isn’t a thing. Their hardware leans into durability and consistent performance under pressure—exactly the traits that benefit from proper maintenance. OWC's maintenance technology is called Innergize, and it’s available across a wide range of media, card readers, docks, and storage devices. It’s now built into OffShoot, on both macOS and Windows. Instead of guessing whether a card is “getting tired,” you’ll know, and you’ll have a one-click cure when it’s time to refresh performance.

What about a card’s firmware? Stay tuned 😉

Throughput

No matter how fast your cameras, workstations, or networks are, your workflow is only as reliable as the card you start with. Treat media like the critical component it is. No matter how fast your setup is, it’s only as reliable as the card you start with.

For your next production, take a bit of time to Health Check your cards during prep. You’ll be surprised how little time it adds, and how much you gain on set. Maintenance no longer has to be an afterthought, but can be a first-class citizen.