Failing to reconnect

[Alex Elkins]

Hi Thomas,

Is this by any chance XDCAM footage that you’ve re-imported at some point?
This sort of thing can happen when FCP converts spanned clips. Do the clips appear to be as long as they should be when you open in Quicktime?

That’s one guess. If not, give us some more details about the footage, your workflow etc.

All the best,
Alex Elkins

[Thomas Klenow with]

XDCAM footage you say. And reimport. That strikes something. But then I guess I will have to tell you the whole history.

The offline files are just part of a major complex of problems which, thinking back, may be related to XDCAM.

For some months we have been working with five short films from Africa- shot with sony PD150 and a small HD camera.

By the end of june they were more or less finished.

Then we did some work on another project – shot in XDCAM. We loaded material – did the editing.

When we returned to the Africa project the speak was gone and some of the pictures had been changed.

Then we went on summerholiday.

When we got back we repaired the Africa-films. We just needed some soundwork to finish it when we got another XDCAM-job. We loaded the XDCAM-material and did the editing. But when we returned to the Africa-films they were corrupted again. That was yesterday:

Speak is missing, clips have gone offline, and some of the clips – once again – have been changed with other clips from the same project.

All of the material is stored on a 3 or 4 TB Rocket-Raid. We keep the FCP-files on the internal HD – with copies on the Raid.

Your remark on XDCAM gave us a lead. It seems very plausible that the XDCAM offsets some problems. But it only happens with files which were imported relatively late in the process.

Then to ‘reimport’ clue:
The problems – except for the speak – seem to occur with clips from tape #10 and some hundrede HD-clips. This material by mistake were loaded/logged – not to the RAID – but on a separate external harddisk which broke down. In the process of recovering/reloading the material something happened:

Tape # 10 exists as a separate 40 min. mediafile (the whole tape) – and as 18 different smaller files which are each parts of the whole tape. They have been given the name Plan 1, Plan 2, PLan 3, Plan … to PLan 18. (The offline files are primarily from these Plan 1-18 files)

I think what we did back then was capturing material from the tape/importing from the HD-camera. Later on – when a witchdoctor recovered the harddisk – we copied the mediafiles to the Rocket Raid – hoping that we would thus be able to reconnect the files directly. That did not work. So we repaired/redited the films the hard way.

Summing up: One problem may stem from the working with XDCAM-files, which sort of throws around some of the files – making some of them offline.

But the files affected all seems to be from tape 10 and the HD files that originally sat on the corrupted harddisk.

phew

Any clues – any fixes?

Thomas Klenow With