EPIC: Lost Takes When Power Cuts

[Abraham Williams]

Documentaries have been going on for 100 years. Even in a documentary situation, you need to let people pause and grab a drink of water or take a break and catch their breath. I would say 20-25 minutes, tops. Continuous 43 minute takes are too much of a strain. If it's a critical situation, I'd say shoot with two cameras and stagger the camera loads.

It wasn't that long ago in the 16mm days that even an 11-minute take was rough, and they could reload in less than :30 seconds. I've done some 7D projects where they'd fill up CF cards every 15-20 minutes or so, and when that happened, the interview subject invariably said, "oh, thank god! Let me have a minute for a quick break." It's just human courtesy.

I fully agree, but in our case the interviewee was used to doing talks for more then an hour straight. Once he got into a flow it was really hard to jolt to a stop in the middle of it. So the director wanted us to go as far as we could. You're right, we should have shot with two cameras in this case though. Lessons learned.

In the end we only lost about 9min of footage. After the camera lost power we kept recording a second shot on the same card. Once the card filled it started recording over the first take. Lucky we stopped soon enough as not to kill the entire first take.
Recovered the rest of the take with Redundead.

 

[Anthony Rinaldi]

try:
sudo redundead ...

I'm glad it worked out!

 

[Abraham Williams]

I'm glad it worked out!

Lol!
Cheers