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  • 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 :)

Repair an r3D challenge!

Sam Goldwater

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Hi all,

So recently went through an almost eerily nightmare scenario on a shoot in rural Italy - both our drives died within hours of each other, and it turns out upon recovery that they may have been erroring during the copies.

I haven't been able to make redundead respond to either part of this two part take. The take shows as offline in Redcine. I'm posting the 2nd half as it's small enough to upload, 800mb. If anyone could have a quick go recovering this that would be freakin' wonderful.

http://we.tl/NBUSxGLR7E

Thanks everyone
 
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I got a no joy on my side, Content offline. Perhaps someone else might be able to check into it too...?
 
Thanks for trying all, really appreciate it. Red Europe are struggling with it too.

I've never seen anything like it. Shooting where we were I wasn't able to get to a connection to get Redcine for the production's laptop until a few days in, so it's partly my fault for not insisting on it from day one. But it just seemed bizarre to me. They were cheap drives, something I flagged some concern for but not enough to vito (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-STB...-2&keywords=seagate+2tb+800&tag=7800651723-21). I formatted in Exfat as I always do, I always checked the mag size vs copy and they always matched, interface was fw800. The broken files, when I was finally able to view them half way through the shoot, I found to generally be preceded by functioning takes where towards the end visual corruption would be present.

When we realised it was midnight on day 3. My AC, the producer and I tore off in the dark to the other accommodation where sometimes the net was working, hoping to do some troubleshooting. Just out of the gate we kind of crashed the rented car, I was on the phone to my girlfriend in England who, over the busted rural line, was trying to read me threads off Reduser about what might be happening. The rest of the crew ran down from the house to get us back on the road. Finally at the house with net I was on the phone to Red US (who were freaking great) and hammering all the threads I could find. We were going until 3am when I went out for a cigarette, and when I came back... The drive had disappeared from the OS. I tried (what I read was definitely non-destructive) OSX disk utility to recover the partition and the result was a seemingly unnamed, empty new partition.

There was no choice but to carry on, so between calls to Italian data recovery specialists we shot the following three days, bought new drives (that were faultless) and came back in daze of relief and trepidation. Now, some weeks later, the missing partition has been recovered, the remaining problem is the busted takes, around 10% of the whole, that now is seemingly unrecoverable. Some Lost in La Mancha shit, for real.

The (working) material looks like this:

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FpAght1l.jpg

eR0RXeBl.jpg

96ItLLNl.jpg

bcl4q4Yl.jpg

nMiRMKgl.jpg
 
Sam

I'll have a look at it, I managed to fix some corrupt files in the past using bit surgery... can you reply here or send me a message with infos on your camera setting (image format, framerate, redcode used).
 
Sorry for your troubles, Sam, but one thing is sure, your stills are absolutely gorgeous. Is it a feature film ?

Kristin
 
Mikael, the settings were: 4k, 25fps, 8:1 - fingers crossed!

Thanks Kristin, nah I've yet to shoot a feature - this was a 10 min drama. Smart project, unpaid, I pitched it to my AC and soundie as 'a semi-holiday in Tuscany'. Spoke way, way too soon ;)
 
some more help.

some more help.

All I have managed to put together easily:


Firmware Version: 4.0.10
Reel #: 005
Date: 20130604
Media Serial #: 21MS10ESTLCZ (possible switch 0 for O)
Camera PIN: 102-7D9-F3E


Your media:


Start: 17:36:24:06
End : 17:36:45:24
Media is ~ 21secs in length


I fudged around with ffmpeg, MEncoder, hex to no avail.


--------------------------------------------
I learned about the rest from the internet, so I have no clue how it was achieved.


-From what I saw: There is a girl, wearing a yellow dress, white sox, what looks like yellow shoes, carrying an old, rusty, metal bucket up a grassy hill. She fetched the water from a fountain right next to the goat, the goat has a rope around its neck. Green grass, sunlight, but it appears she is under the shade of trees or tree.
--------------------------------------------


--hints, found around the internet, not free.--
""
How to repair a corrupt REDCODE clip?
The easiest way is certainly to ask our Movie Repair Service to do it for you.
But for those who can program, here you have a few tips:


REDCODE .r3d files can be parsed by identifying blocks of data with the atom structure:
32-bits length + token + payload


Tokens:
RED1, RED3 ... indicate type of RED media
REDV ... video frame
REDA ... audio frame
REDC ?
RPAD ... padding
RDVS ... frame size table, video
RDAO ... frame address table

""

--end--

So a company in Spain is offering the service above.
 
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I'm out. No luck with my method. Kalulu is right though.There is a program that does seem to do some deep analysis and his images are correct. The program is called Treasured (google it). After scanning, you can get a quote for a full fix. Apparently.

Best of luck with it. That little girl in the yellow dress is going to be hanging out with a donkey in r3d heaven me thinks though.
 
Haha, that is at least some consolation - a girl and a donkey (actually a goat, I believe) under a tree in r3d heaven. It sounds like a weird place.

You guys are freaking great, thanks so much for everyone's input. There are times when Red would be a difficult and lonely world without RU. I'll look into Treasured, maybe some of the other borked material is less irretrievable.
 
REDUNDEAD is only for recovering R3D files from the camera media. Did you run it on the media to see what comes up? Can be handy if you have formatted a card in preparation for another days shooting, but haven't shot anything yet. Sometimes after if not much has been recorded to that media since.

Bit twiddling and fixing can repair corrupt R3D files only as far as corrupt header and frame info goes, you can't rebuild lost or corrupt pixel data due to the wavelet nature and inherent encryption the wavelets impose. On top of that, corrupt or missing data is just that. Even in situations where you can recreate pixel data, what do you put there? May as well go into Photoshop for each frame and draw in the missing bits...

Sometimes you can repair clips good enough to get it to play through. Perhaps get partial, or even full frames where the corruption exists. Perhaps the corruption isn't bad or not even visible. If the damaged frames are a problem, they can be eliminated or doctored in post.
 
You are not going to believe this @(*&$ but the media is no longer offline in redcine. There is a problem still, the redcine player still sees it as one frame, I'm gonna keep digging. I'm very excited about my trials...

ejiZ0BR.jpg
 
You're not going to believe it, again!!! 8 frames recovered, partial damage, still working on it. Proof, Color correct attached image. Redlog film

zbpIjQQ.jpg
 
I have had the meta data corrupt be-fore now and segmented R3D's not play. We fixed it by removing all segments bar one, only leaving one in the directory which would play, just swap out the segment just fixed the replacememt would then become accessible. it seemed to be something to do with the medatata being incorrectly written and not seeing the next segment in the sequence. We just exported the segment to a new file to create new media and left the origionals in the archive.
 
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