Why My PS5 Captures Kept Breaking (It Was How I Turned It Off)

Intro

You clip the exact moment a trophy pops, come back later to grab it, and… error. Won’t play. Back when I first started writing trophy guides, this happened to me again and again.

“I literally just recorded this, why won’t it open?” If you’ve ever sat frozen in front of the screen thinking that, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. When an hour-long gameplay recording turns out to be unplayable, every last bit of motivation just leaves the solar system.

In this post I’ll cover the condition that was breaking my clips, my current flow from recording to publishing, and why you don’t need to overspend on an external SSD. It’s for working gamers who want to keep their gameplay footage but have zero interest in falling down the gear rabbit hole.

🔍 Every Search Result Said “Defective Console”

When my clips started breaking, I spent a lot of time looking for the cause. But most of what came up was about faulty consoles or dying storage, plus some talk about format compatibility. Hmm. None of it matched my situation. Plenty of my clips recorded and played back just fine, so a broken PS5 didn’t seem likely.

So I switched tactics. I stopped hunting for an answer online and started comparing the broken clips against the ones that worked.

⚡ The Difference Between Broken and Healthy Clips: How I Turned the PS5 Off

Once I started checking, a pattern showed up.

The longer clips I saved and then immediately powered off after were the broken ones. Every clip where I put the PS5 into Rest Mode after saving was fine.

During a 1–2 hour session, I’d regularly use the PS5’s feature to save recent gameplay. When I was done for the night, I’d save the last 60 minutes, go “ahh, good session,” and shut the console down. Those were the clips that kept getting corrupted. The ones where I ended in Rest Mode never broke.

How I ended the session was the dividing line. My guess is that the PS5 keeps processing the file in the background after you hit save, and cutting the power chops that off mid-way, which corrupts the file…?

To be honest, I don’t actually know why it happens. I couldn’t find any warning about this in Sony’s official guidance either. So I’m not going to claim “turning it off breaks your clips.” All I can say is that on my console, the condition lined up every time.

Maybe this is obvious to people who know the hardware, but it was a blind spot for me. If you’re dealing with the same issue, try putting the PS5 into Rest Mode after saving. Since I started doing that, I haven’t lost a single file.

🎬 How I Make My Trophy Guides and Videos

Now for where all that footage ends up. Gameplay clips pile up fast, and before you know it you’re drowning in files.

Every video in my guides and on my YouTube channel goes through the same path: record on the PS5, move it to an external SSD, edit on my Mac with CapCut and Pixelmator Pro, then upload the files I used to Google Drive. I don’t own a capture card or any special gear, so it’s pure hobbyist editing. Still working on getting better at it.

You can’t really move or store files in this workflow without an SSD. The problem is they’ve gotten seriously expensive lately.

💾 Treat the SSD as a Relay Point and 500GB Is Plenty

SSDs really are pricey right now. And for some reason I can never bring myself to delete a clip even after it’s on YouTube, so my storage only ever grows. The fix for me was making Google Drive the place everything piles up, not the SSD.

At first I figured if I was buying an SSD anyway, I should go 1TB or 2TB. But with Google Drive doing the heavy lifting, 500GB has been more than enough.

Here’s why: the only job my SSD actually does is carry clips from the PS5 to the Mac. Once I realized that, 500GB made total sense.

For long-term storage after editing, I use the cloud. When I signed up for Google’s AI Pro plan (the one with Gemini), it came with 2TB of Google Drive storage, so everything goes in there. Google has since bumped that plan to 5TB. Since I’m getting storage on top of an AI tool I already use, it feels less wasteful than paying for storage on its own. AI has been super handy for drafting articles and brainstorming ideas too, so it’s a two-birds-one-stone thing.

Pick a 1TB or 2TB drive and you’re paying for empty space you’ll never use. Put that money toward AI plus cloud storage and buy your next game instead lol.

For the record, this setup completely solved my storage problem. The one catch is uploading from the Mac to the cloud. If your home internet is slow, especially upload speed, you’ll be waiting a while. That’s about the only downside.

✅ Picking an External SSD: Only 3 Things Matter

So if I were choosing an external SSD for this, here are the only three things I’d look at.

1. Capacity: It’s just a relay, so 500GB is plenty.
2. A USB-C to USB-C cable in the box: Recent Macs are mostly USB-C, so you need that cable. This one’s a sneaky trap. Plenty of drives have a USB-C port on the drive itself but only ship with a USB-C to USB-A cable. I almost bought the wrong one myself once. Always check the “what’s in the box” section of the product page.
3. Speed: 400MB/s or faster is enough. With this workflow the bottleneck is your internet connection, so those 1,050MB/s drives you see everywhere are overkill and priced like it.

I’m not going to recommend a specific model here. The drive I use is a discontinued one from another brand, and what’s on the shelf varies a lot by country anyway. If you find something in the 400MB/s range that clearly lists a USB-C to USB-C cable in the box, you’re good.

Wrapping Up

You can’t re-record the moment a trophy pops, so you really don’t want that clip to fail. For me, the fix was a boring little habit: put the PS5 into Rest Mode after saving.

My next trophy guide will go up as soon as I finish the game I’m working on now. Swing by again!

📚 You might also like these guides

• Onimusha: Way of the Sword Trophy Guide – my most recent platinum, and the most fun action game I’ve played in a while
• Final Fantasy XV Trophy Guide – finally cleaning up a platinum 10 years later
• Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Platinum Review – a chill platinum if you want a breather