PC can't seem to handle my 4K files

[RichC]

First of all I'm a newbie here and appreciate this forum. I've been pulling my hair out over something that happened a couple of days ago.

I purchased a Lumix G7 a few weeks ago. Love it. Took it on vacation and shot a mix of HD video and 4K video.
Returned from vacation a few days ago put the card in the card reader and plugged the card reader into my pc.
Windows explorer showed all the thumbnails for about 3 or 4 seconds, then seemed to refresh and froze before the thumbnails returned.
Nothing happened. Completely frozen. I know it's not smart to remove the card reader without going through the proper motions but after 10 minutes of nothing happening I pulled the card reader and rebooted the computer.
I put he card reader back in the computer and all the 4k files were gone. Everything else was there.
I removed the card and put it away hoping i'll be able to recover the files but I can't understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. Any ideas?

12GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Intel i5-2500 3.3GHz processor, using Windows 7

Any thoughts would be appreciated

[redwudz]

Better to shut down the PC instead of pulling a card while the OS is trying to read it.

Others here may have more suggestions.

And welcome to our forums.

[ivortripod]

You could try this link for info : http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-3325179/play-large-video-files.html

[Marsia Mariner]

A moderator or the OP themselves should change the title of this topic, because it's misleading.

[RichC]

I'd be happy to change the title if you can tell me what's misleading about it. I try to open 4k video with my pc and the pc crashes.

[Marsia Mariner]

First of all, make sure your PC is capable of playing 4K video files flawlessly.
By downloading a free UHD sample file and then opening with a media player, for example.
From what you said, MAYBE the problem is in the card or/and in the card reader.

Anyway: letting Windows Explorer show video thumbnails is a waste of resources and (therefore) a bad idea,
no matter how fast are the cores or how many tons of RAM your computer has.

[SamT]

Don't be put off by some posters on this forum. A few can be somewhat unsympathetic to newbies and their descriptions of the issue at hand. A more accurate title seems to be that "your computer can't read the files on your SD card when you use a card reader"

Firstly, In my experience and having read numerous sources over decades, removing an SD card from a computer is unlikely to damage the files contained therein - unless you were in the process of writing to the card at the time or, had just written to the SD card. Since you were not doing that with your computer, its likely your 4K files on the SD card are still okay. I don't bother dismounting an SD if I just read files ages ago and don't have a problem.

Secondly, you don't say if the card reader you use is a new one or something you regularly use without previous issue. Nor do you say what capacity your SD card is.

As you are recording 4K files I suspect its larger than 32GB and Class 10 at least.

How old is your card reader? Was it designed for reading SDXC cards to 256GB and above?

Until you check suitability of the card reader for large capacity SD cards its my first area to investigate.

Regards

SamT