Error transcoding r3d file...

[Björn Benckert]

Shot 11 mags of material yesturday. And today in offline we realize that some material is missing. A long take of 10minutes was only 40seconds. So I went back to the r3d's and it's a 10minute file but even in redcine there is parts of the file that only is represented as freeze frame.
So I now redered out as much as I could from the clip (see attached screendump of timeline with holse in it...

Now Im worried that I have more errors because my r3d timeline in redcine all clips together is about 2hours and 30 minutes and the same thing for the proxies are just over 2 hours... so I'm afraid I'm missing 30 minutes of material.

Right now I'm rerender all my proxies to see if I get any error reports. It's possible that I got error reports when doing the transcodes but as the program crashed a few times and such I did not bother to reed them sadly.... Unstable RCXP / Rocket makes it difficult to know when there is real issues.


To make mathers worse we did not use our camera but had rental instead so tomorrow I will run over there and hopefully find the mag used. And as the error clip was on one of the last mags I might be able to save it as card reader error or such... hoping...


But is there any way to clean up a r3d with errors run read un dead or such on it.... I have not used that program or had any r3d errors ever before. So this is completely new territory for me.


Any help is wellcome.

 

[Björn Benckert]

We shot with the motion mount and I guess latest build.... again was not my camera so I don not know for sure.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Another Quesition....

When a file has error should not Red Cine X pro stop on that file... I see now that it says "finished with error" in the batch output on several clips... When trying to process broken files in the passed I thought the batch always stopped but now it seems to just continue with the next clip in line... that is great in one perspective. but for error detection it was catastrophe, at least for me yesterday...

If something is up with a file I would love a bigger notification. Like the whole screen start to blink red or such

 

[Justin O'Neill]

If you copied the .log file over from the SSDs you can send that to the RED engineers and they can look at it to see if anything went wrong.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Thanks.
Do not have the SSD here will fetch them tomorrow morning from the rental house... Is the log file in camera or on the SSD? We copy everything over from the SSD's but then I only get the r3d folders, no log file correct?

Will call red and see if they can help...

Mad

Attached are screen dumps of the redcine renders I now did to find error clips.... it's quite random it's about every 7th clip or so that got errors. often quite far into the clips and then some clips got good footage, then error frames(reprecented as freeze frames when scrubbing in RCXP) then they got more footage that is ok after the errors... Alot of them comes back around frame 1780.... very odd.

We used 4x128Gb cards in rotation and it does look like it's not the cards as the errors are pretty much spread out all over them.

So I asume it's one of the following thats faulty....

camera,SSD reader or hard drive raid...

Out of those 3 I think the hard drive is the least to be the problem.
I also tested to transcode on different computer setup and the errors are showing on all of them. With rocket, without rocket, with GPU render, without GPU render.

So my worry is that it's the rented camera. I do not think it's the cardreaders I been using them alot and never had issues and it seams odd that copying the data would cause this kind of error.

If the cards are ok then I can rescue 4 out of 11 mags tomorrow. but sadly I think it's from the camera...

It really blows as it's a high profile makeup commercial for a big agency from Newyork... but at the same time we are lucky as they shoot so much of every setup so I have no doubt that it could be saved in editing. But of course the clients are freaking out when part of their matierial is missing...

We where recording on a PIX as well so for a moment I figured that would save us, but the shit thing is that we used a steady cam the whole day together with a wireless bolt so the signal is not good enough to use for the edit....

Edit: those attachement got rather small here is links:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/107237384@N04/11987000093/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/107237384@N04/11986704855/

 

[Andy White]

Any updates on this issue?

Hope you managed the clients OK

 

[Björn Benckert]

The stuff that where still on the mags was possible to recover. Some sort of camera issue, as the cards could not be copied no matter what card reader/computer. The clients are ok. The camera was not mine so I do not know the rest of the story just yet. It might have been a firmware thing, as we used the latest firmware with motion mount shooting over cranked. All in all it makes me think that buying enough SSD mags to cover for at least a days shooting is possibly not such bad idea. Allways feels a bit odd to have mags in rotation on quick commercial work where there is not really enough time to render transcodes for all the shots while moving on, especially when having multi camera setups and such.

I never had any issues with lost footage before. So I guess my DIT procedures gone a bit sloppy... That will for sure change. Nobody leaves set before the material is copied and transcoded without errors from now on...

But it's difficult, normally I make sure the DIT takes the mag after each setup, even if it's just a few shots on it. Then he can check and make sure it's there and the shots can move on to be evaluated for VFX / on set editing and so on, but that also means the mags are in high rotation.... The other scenario shooting with big mags and not copy until almosts filled is also running with the risk of having a full mag with issues...

So no matter how you slice it it's still a bit risky.

 

[luigivaltulini]

I had the same problem some time ago with my Epic, I remember that I turned off the recording and shared immediately with a new recording a fraction of a second. I noticed lcd flashing slightly and I immediately stopped recording. Having tried to play by the camera and was only half of the movie and very jerky. Then I rebooted and everything going ok.
But that file in REDCINE-x gave the same mistakes that you have had, and after a couple of tests rendering, have gone offline.

 

[David Battistella]

Bjorn,

Have you tried to use the TRIM R3D function to cut out the back end of one of the damaged clips and see if it will create a new clip? That might be worth a try.

Next would be REDundead from the mags.

If you need any help with this you can call me, no problem.

Battistella

 

[Björn Benckert]

Bjorn,

Have you tried to use the TRIM R3D function to cut out the back end of one of the damaged clips and see if it will create a new clip? That might be worth a try.

Next would be REDundead from the mags.

If you need any help with this you can call me, no problem.

Battistella

Yes did it all ready but the errors are quite long so we lost about 10 minutes out of two an a half hour of material.

 

[Dave Blackham]

Are these spanned clips ?

 

[Dave Blackham]

If they re spanned clid and by the looks they may be. Here's what we did, Im not saying this is the only way to fix this but we managed to recover some clips this way. I don't know if this relates to your issue or not.

The spanned clip has several segments with in the directory. For some reason the clips didn't link and play sequentially. Create a separate directory to temporarily move some of the segments not needed whilst fixing the issue. We had 4 segments numbered 1,2,3,4 we removed segments 2, 3 and renumbered the remaining two segments as 1, 2 and the clip played OK. We then replaced the final segment (we renamed as 2) with the original segment 2 and the clip played OK again with the essence of segment 2. and then repeated the process with segment 3 renumberd as 2.

This is from memory but hopefully you get the idea. I guess Red may be able to give you a better work around but this worked for us just by re rendering the clips we needed by manually rebuilding the directory contents.