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A pickle of a jam. “Undeleted” mp4 files need restoring.
Well, it finally happened. On a mac formatted drive we deleted and emptied the trash on some bpav folders that we still needed. We caught the problem moments later, and using the FileSalvage program were able to “restore” the deleted files. It threw roughly 1,900 mp4 files into a folder marked “mp4” and numbered them in the order they were recovered.
So here’s where I am. I need about 400 of those 1,900 files, but all the original file names are gone. I transferred them over to an ntfs external drive so i can easily browse through them on my pc. I can view then in gmplayer, but Sony ClipBrowser 2 won’t import any of them. I’ve had clipbrowser2 open orphaned mp4 files before, but apparently something in the restoration process has made clipbrowser not able to open them. If the video still plays in a stand-alone video player, certainly the data is still there and usable. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to import these back-from-the-dead mp4’s into either Sony Vegas Pro 8 or FCP 6? Any help would be appreciated.
-Dave
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7 Replies
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Try this Mac utility
https://www.ffmpegx.com/download.html
You’ll need to convert them to something else like a high quality H264 file but it may work.Did you make optical disc (DL-DVD or Blu-ray) back ups?
My pet peeve but hard drives are not back-up media. It’s an accident waiting to happen. -
And this my friends is why I’m a big fan of two backups if possible of every BPAV folder. If you were shooting film you probably wouldn’t burn your original negatives to make space in the closet. Yet that’s what we do when we delete original camera folders. Here endeth the sermon…
Noah
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[Craig Seeman] “Try this Mac utility
https://www.ffmpegx.com/download.html
You’ll need to convert them to something else like a high quality H264 file but it may work.”Actually that was one of the first things I tried as per your advice in an old thread I found. ffmpegx didn’t recognize the file type. Using Gspot for windows correctly identifies the codec in the mp4, but like I said the only program I’ve been able to actually play the file in is gmplayer for windows, and I have no idea why.
Our preferred backup method is to transfer the cards directly onto two separate hard drives in an external enclosure, which always works great for us. The problem comes when the company doesn’t own enough cards to make it through the weekend without having to clear them, and they have to be dumped onto a single hard drive in the meantime. Generally when you buy more EX1’s, you buy more cards to go with them.
I was thinking if no program could edit these files, I could look into some sort of equipment to rent that could record hd footage from the dvi output of my computer, but that gmplayer program I mentioned doesn’t deinterlace properly so the footage doesn’t look that great. I uploaded a short 38mb clip to a server so my friend could mess around with it, but we got nowhere. If you’d like to take a shot at it you can grab it at https://www.davebo.com/5.mp4 Thanks for your help so far.
-Dave
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On Mac
VLC 0.9.5 Played it without issue.
MPlayer 1.0rc2 Played it without issue.
ffmpegX 0.0.9y converted it to mpeg4.mov using the preset and that Plays audio and video just fine.
ClipBrowser 2 tells me I don’t have the right to access the file although I made sure file has both read/write access.ffmpegx certainly will reencode the file though on my system.
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That’s odd, i got 0.0.9 last night to try it with and it said unknown format. Maybe I’m missing some codecs but when I installed it had me download 3 things which I did.
I think my troubles are pretty much solved though. I’m not sure why because I tried this solution last night and it didn’t work, but it worked now. I called Sony Posse tech support and they had me change the name of the file and try importing it. Last night i tried naming that 5.mp4 file as “099_0512_01.MP4” and it would not import into sony clipbrowser 2. Sony had me call it “076_0041(1)_01.MP4” and it imported perfectly and allowed me to export as an mxf so I could drop it into Vegas.
Since ideally we’d edit this in FCP 6, do you know how I could export from the pc clipbrowser 2 in a format FCP would edit, or will Sony’s FCP import tool also import orphaned mp4’s now?
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Did Sony explain why one naming convention failed and another worked?
BTW they still give me a permissions issue and even when I match my own naming convention it still does.
Your best bet is to allow Sony ClipBrowser 2 to create a new BPAV folder (it should if it imported the orphan) and then use that BPAV in Mac XDCAM Transfer to wrap as MOV. FCP6 wants MOV.
It might be an interesting experiment to use ClipBrowser to make MXF for NLEs but somehow I doubt that would work (unless using CalibratedQ’s MXF import????). Even if it did that would be a kludge compared to using BPAV in XDCAM Transfer to wrap as MOV.
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[David Shirey] “That’s odd, i got 0.0.9 last night to try it with and it said unknown format.”
There are several releases of 0.0.9. There was a few YEARS between updates I understand. You need 0.0.9y of FFMPEGX.
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