Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Please Help - 2 TB of Material destroyed!

N

Niki Drozdowski

Member
Joined
May 7, 2009
Messages
13
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Hello everyone :)

I am the director and producer of a German independent film shot on the Red and we are in the middle of post and preparing the final cut. Everything went just fine (FCP 6, working with 2k Apple ProRes Proxies), until we needed some additional material today and connected the 2TB disk with the r3d-files to transfer. The first went fine, but after 30 min we needed something else and now the material looks like this:

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3

Almost every frame has a different error pattern - every 5th frame or so seems to be OK.

Tried it on two different FCP-systems, tried all RDMs. Tried copying it from the disk and transfer it then. Nothing. Shooting days 21-25, which are on a different disk, are OK.

Any suggestions? We got a backup, but it takes 40 hours to copy and I am scared, it might happen again!

Thanks for reading,

best regards,
Niki Drozdowski
 
All the quicktime previews also look like this. The same with the r3d opened in Clipfinder. The r3d opened in RedAlert are just black.

Apples Disk Utility says the disk "seems" to be OK.

Other files on the disk (audio) seem to be unaffected
 
Have you filed a support ticket on www.red.com/support ? Can you clarify - did the footage at once look fine then now looks like this? Or did it always look like this? We dailies done routinely to check footage?

Without knowing more info, it could be the 2TB drive was not unmounted properly or maybe a port was fried if you powered through FW800 instead of using a separate power adaptor. Both of those could damage the drive which could lead to the footage being compromised.

BC
 
Hi BC,

thanks for the fast reply. The material looked fine until an hour ago - we've been working with it for month. It just came all of a sudden. Indeed we unmounted the drive, but properly (icon disappearing in Mac OS), and when we remounted it, it looked like this. A disk error would be strange, since it affected only the content of the files, not the structure, because all files are present, have the correct size and are readable. And the audio files on the same disk are alright too.

Best, Niki
 
And the footage was find on that same 2TB drive an hour ago, right? Do you have the original media used for recording (RED-DRIVE or RED CF, eg)?

Please do submit a support ticket so one fo the tech support guys can assist.

Thanks, BC
 
Hi BC,

we don't have the original media storage available, since its 2,5 TB footage in total and it was rental equipment.

And yes, all the clips were fine an hour ago, now all of them are corrupt. But playing.

I submitted a support ticket - thank you so much for the fast help at this early hour (well, over here its afternoon :)

Best,
Niki
 
Niki Drozdowski said:
The first went fine, but after 30 min we needed something else and now the material looks like this:
Click to expand...

Are you sure the problem is with the material, not with your editing system?

Have you tried the material on another computer?

Have you tried using some other red footage on this computer?
 
I'll divert to the guys at RED to help get this sorted out... But it's a fine example of why you need backups. HDDs and file systems can go corrupt anytime, anywhere. 2.5TB is small potatoes these days with 1TB drives going for less than $80.

I recommend not doing anything until the guys at RED have more info and give you a course of action. Many data recover softwares tend to semi-destructively write to the volume they are trying to recover (if that makes any sense, but they do) and there really are not any out there that properly recover R3D files anyway. RED Undead may be a solution here too, but that could still depend on how and why the files are being corrupted.
 
I just checked some HVX200 footage, which was stored on the same disk: Big colored blocks. And when you copy working footage onto the disk, it becomes unreadable. So it seems, the whole disk went bye-bye. Three months old.

Well, at least we have warranty.

Thank you guys very much for your help! :smile5:
 
Try copying from a different port other than the Firewire 800 from the drive. If there is a Firewire 400 port try copying from there. It might be a bad port corrupting the data downstream but the actual data on the drive itself would be fine with a good port transfer from say firewire 400 or USB 2. I know it will be a painfully long transfer but test on one clip and see if that works.
 
I would not use that drive again. Leave it alone and get new drive and start the backup procedure.
 
Niki Drozdowski said:
We got a backup, but it takes 40 hours to copy and I am scared, it might happen again!
Click to expand...

Wow just a short... 40 hours of restore 2.5Tb... so a full feature is one week??? or more???

And none needs a fast reliable data transporting system... that would do the 40hours... 1hour... or the 8 days, one shift... I was almost convinced on another forum...
 
40 hours to restore 2.5TB of data? WTF? What are you restoring the data over 100Mbps ethernet?

Anyway, could be a port or interface problem. Could be a problem with the host controller or system. Lots of things could be wrong here. Chances are that if the data was fine on the drive just before it all apparently went bad, then the data is probably still fine and readable on the drive platters, but it could be file system info causing the problem or other issues mentioned above. Data recovery sounds like a realistic possibility here. However, it's probably going to be cheaper and easier to restore from the backups, that 40-hour thing doesn't make any sense though.
 
Just for curiosity, what is the brand of the drive?
 
Eki Halkka said:
Are you sure the problem is with the material, not with your editing system?

Have you tried the material on another computer?

Have you tried using some other red footage on this computer?
Click to expand...

Checksums would be able to help in this situation. By using checksums initially when the files were first stored on the drive, then checking those checksums after the problems started happening, you would be able to tell where in the system the issue is.

If the checksums came back matching, then it would be an issue with the software on the system not decoding material correctly. If the checksums did not match, then it would be a hardware error with the controller/drive.

Sounds like the OP did figure out the issue and had backups.
 
Hi everybody,

I managed to fix it. Alsoft Diskwarrior did the trick. So Jeff was right: After the disks directory replacement everything was fine again. But we're probably still going to buy a new disk.

The drive is an WD MyBook Mirror Edition (on the set we used the Studio Edition for the initial backup). With the 40 hours I meant copying the whole 2,5 TB over to another disk. It takes approx. 1 min. per GB, so 2500 min. equal 41 hours. Just a normal copy via USB2. On my MacBook :)

I know, it sounds semiprofessional, but we are independent... and not "American-everything-under-10-million-is-low-budget"-independent but "German-I-have-to-lend-money-from-friends-and-family"-independent :smilewinkgrin:

And it is no short - we shot a full 110 min. desaster movie in english for approx. 150.000 $. If you want to, you can check out the trailer on Facebook or YouTube

But thank you all so much for your help and suggestions!

Best regards,
Niki Drozdowski
 
Just FYI, the WD external drives are garbage, especially the MyBook series. We have no love for them here. ;)

Glad you have everything working and disk warrior fixed it for you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top