-
Is captured data recoverable after a dropped-frames abort?
So I was recording a LIVE three-hour event straight through to my hard drive through FCP, standard-def DV stream, tapeless from the camera… so you can probably see this coming.
I didn’t know about the pref setting to not abort capture if frames are dropped, and my cameraman shut off the camera at the end of the event before I could get to the computer and hit “esc” to complete the capture… so I lost the full three hours of recording from my main camera. The hard drive read as empty in the Capture Scratch folder and nothing showed up in the project.
As you can imagine, I’m beside myself… but given that the data has to have been written to the disc in some form and was just awaiting a final “close out” command and header-write to complete the QT file and officially show up on the desktop, is there ANY way to recover my data, as long as I don’t write anything more to that drive? That’s step one, which I did, so finding the files was not the problem.
In fact I did “recover” all the invisible cached data files from the drive, including the huge ones I reckon are the actual DV streams data (I used the Data Rescue II software, and it recovered a whole slew of files that it tagged as “-av” at the end of the name, so I think it recognizes that these are audiovisual data), but Quicktime of course cannot read them. They have the correct timestamp to my capture period and are hundreds of files paced out at about 1-minute intervals, which makes sense… FCP would cache chunks of the DV stream at intervals until the capture was complete, then “close” the QT file by tagging all of these pieces as one big QT movie. So I think all of these files I recovered are those cached chunks of DV data. They are huge, much bigger than the original drive itself –from my original 250Gb drive, I recovered 710 files totaling 784Gb! (I recovered them onto a G-RAID2 2Tb drive, so I had the space). I’ve heard from other FCP users that unfinished QTs tend to show up as files way bigger than they should…
My actual three hours of capture at DV resolutions should end up about 38Gb or so… I am hoping that someone can suggest a way to decode the raw “-av” streams back into some readable form. I don’t care if it’s in a hundred small segments, as long as I can read them and recompile them all manually into one long QT.
I’ve asked Apple but I was told there was nothing to be done, although I’m sure they have a way to do it but probably don’t want to delve into anything that might expose any proprietary coding or DRM stuff used in the creation of QTs. I also did not get a single reply when I posted this question on the Apple Forums almost a month ago.
This was footage for a non-profit organization for which I was volunteering my efforts, and so I really want to try to recover the DV material if at all possible. Is there a utility on any platform that might be able to read the data as raw DV streams and convert them into something readable on the Mac?
For the future, I reckon I’ve learned that tapeless recording of live events is not a good idea and that we should really be backing up to tape during the shoot as well… that, and to uncheck the “abort capture on dropped frames” preference… but for the present, does anyone have a solution to recover or read that DV stream data from the recovered files?
Thanks in advance for your guidance–V
-
1 Reply
-
Generally, no.
There is no file completion data so there is no reliable directory data. It’s like saying you built the bridge but you don’t know how long the bridge is, what it’s made out of, or if it crosses another road or a river. In fact, you don’t even know what country the bridge is in. Might not even really be there. or the middle sections are located in another parallel universe.
There may be file recovery services that can do this for you but it will be cheaper to restage the event and record it to tape like every competent producer would do anyway. Please don’t misinterpret that last statement, it’s not personal. It’s for the benefit of anyone who searches the forms in the future.There are some really good reasons we’ve been videotape for 50 years.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up