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April 15, 2006
IEEE 1394 SOS
I've broken the raw footage from The Outlaw Son into ninety-eight different exported clips, each consisting of a single take of one of the shots that comprise the twenty-two different scenes we filmed (the script only had eleven). They've been burned onto DVDs that will begin to be shipped out Monday morning, all around the world; eventually, they'll find their way back here. I'm very much looking forward to that.
But in the meantime, all that footage, and all the footage for the Deadroom documentary I'm working on, is residing on a Firewire drive, one which became host to some sort of corruption last night. I can't quite figure out what happened; I took the drive over to Yen's place to give him the footage, and it wouldn't register on his desktop. Not only that, but after restarting his computer, all his other Firewire drives had vanished as well. He tried various fixes, but the disks stayed gone. I took my drive home and plugged it in to the port where only a few hours earlier it had been functioning fine - and nothing. I had resigned myself to having to start over from scratch - it was an oddly liberating disaster, once I came to terms with it - when I tried to connect the drive through its USB port. That worked.
But working with massive amounts of digital video over a USB cable is highly impractible, so this afternoon I went out and put a big new external Firewire drive on my credit card. My poor Visa certainly wasn't in need of such an incurrence, but on the plus side, whoever designed this particular drive must have been a Star Wars fan, because it looks like an accessory from the Death Star. That's enough to make me happy. Yen, however, still can't get his Firewire drives (which don't have USB ports) to respond, so if anyone with any technical expertise has any insight into the matter, please do share it.
I'm now transferring 120 gigabytes of audio and video to this new drive, by way of USB. It'll take about twenty hours. That frees up the rest of the long weekend to work on this screenplay, which I've given the working title of Ain't Them Bodies Saints.
The film I'm helping Clay with is a lovingly comic homage to old Flash Gordon serials. I've gone from being grip to script super to boom operator. On Monday, I think I'm playing a mad scientist. While shooting one particularly goofy scene yesterday (although everything seems goofy when you're interacting with green screen environments), someone whom we were later told was the Argentine Ambassador and his entourage wandered onto the sound stage and watched us at work. Much like the hard drive problems, it didn't make any sense. We just kept shooting.
Posted by David Lowery at April 15, 2006 09:02 PM
Comments
I've had my Firewire drive crash on me twice in the past, though not in the manner described here. Both times it was my own fault, having unplugged it while it was in the middle of doing something. Both times the computer refused to recognise the drive when I turned it on next, and both times I was forced to use a special program to slowly extract everything from it, as if emptying a filing cabinet through a keyhole, so that I could then format the drive without losing everything, a process that, second time around, took seventy-two hours all up...
Posted by: Matt at April 16, 2006 03:28 AM
You always seem to precede me in experiencing these computer problems, Matt, and for that, I thank you. Don't you just love those self-inflicted computer errors? It's like slapping yourself on the back of the head without realizing that your hand's been replaced by a cast iron skillet.
Okay, that's a pretty belabored analogy. Do you know the name of that sofware you used, by any chance? Yen's on a Vaio, and so he might be able to make use of it.
Posted by: Ghostboy at April 16, 2006 12:18 PM
I once lost a 250 gb LaCie to such a problem. A company used by Norwegian police to recover data files managed to save a few project files from my FCP-folders, but all else was lost. I had to batch all footage again, but this is one of those 'digital world'-pains that I just barely can stand. It's like watching your house burn down (almost).
Posted by: Karsten at April 17, 2006 09:41 AM
I guess things like that are invevitable - and when they do happen, I just try to remember that they're small prices to pay for the luxury that the 'digital world' otherwise provides.
Although I would like to try editing a movie on a flatbed someday...
Posted by: Ghostboy at April 17, 2006 03:41 PM
The program is called Active Undelete. I downloaded the demo and cracked it. And then, as I said, seventy-two hours to extract everything...
Posted by: Matt at April 17, 2006 06:36 PM
sounds familiar. my ipoo died tonight.
Posted by: brad at April 17, 2006 11:09 PM
much thanks to matt, but i'm afraid active undelete won't work in my case (when my computer doesn't read the drives AT ALL). a friend suggested that i purchase an external hard drive enclosure, which i did and lo and behold... a belated easter resurrection did occur and my drive is alive and kicking again! somehow, the firewire connection in the old case was screwed up during our hook-ups.
brad: i may have some fixes for your ipod. i've gone through this (many times) before, what are the symptoms?
Posted by: Yen at April 17, 2006 11:30 PM