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Hard Drive exploded, need to recapture, how screwed am I?
The other day my Lacie Big Disk Extreme firewire drive randomly went up in smoke when I was trying to print my short film back onto digibeta tape. Sent the drive to Lacie and they said that the drives themselves were damaged and all they could do is either 1-replace the drives (thus losing all the data) or 2-send the whole unit to some place to try data recovery. As I’ve heard data recovery is iffy and expensive, I was hoping to just recapture the material.
Here’s the complication, the material was film-originated 23.98p. To be more precise, I captured at 10 bit uncompressed 29.97 60i from the digibeta tape onto a Lacie big disk extreme. I made sure I started the capture of each reel (which ran around 20-30 min) from its burn in and ended the capture on a ‘0’ on the time code. I then used Cinema Tools to reverse the telecine from each reel and got 10 bit uncompressed 23.98p reels. The 10 bit material was too much for my Mini, so I used the Media Manager to made NTSC DV (DV25) copies of the reels. From the timeline, I found I could make each clip offline, then reconnect it to the 10 bit material and back again at will. After testing it back and forth at least a couple dozen times, I found I could easily switch b/t the 23.98p DV25 material and the 23.98 10 bit uncompressed material.
To be on the safe side, I duplicated the 23.98 DV25 reels onto a separate firewire drive and made my edit primarily from them. When the edit was nearly finished, I pulled out the Lacie drive and compiled a 23.98 10 bit uncompressed version of the movie. Again, just to be on the -
4 Replies
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I don’t see any problems with this as long as you recapture the original clips as logged the first time…
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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Jerry,
Thank you for that. Do you think it might create a problem though if the out point of my captures are slightly different when I recapture? The in point should be pretty easy to spot, but the out point might be off by a second or two.
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You mean there’s no timecode associated with the earlier captures? You can’t just select the offline material and recapture it via timecode? If you can’t, I’ll wager it might be easier to start over using dubs of the material so there IS timecode.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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“You mean there’s no timecode associated with the earlier captures? You can’t just select the offline material and recapture it via timecode?”
I’m sorry, it’s a little tricky and that’s what I was trying to explain. I captured at 29.97 and then used cinema tools to remove the pulldown. I then made my edit from the 23.98 material that Cinema Tools made. Unless I find a CD somewhere that has it backed up, I think I lost the FCP project files of the capturing of the material as well as all the 10 bit uncompressed 29.97 files and the 10 bit uncompressed 23.98 files. The only thing I have is the NTSC DV (DV25) copies made of the 10 bit uncompressed 23.98 files.
I’m actually a bit confused how timecode works, but I don’t think I can batch capture the missing 10 bit uncompressed 23.98 files as the decklink cards I have access to will only capture at 29.97. Basically what I’m trying to do is trick FCP by 1- remaking the missing files (capture the clips at 29.97 as best I can to the same in and out points, then use Cinema Tools to make the clips 23.98)
then 2- make the current DV25 files offline, then reconnect them to the new 10 bit 23.98 uncompressed files.
Again, I don’t know very much about timecode, but I would think my new 23.98 files would have the same timecode as the old ones since the timecode is locked on the digitbeta tape, correct? So, I’m thinking that even if my new captures are tiny bit off on their out point (again, the in point should be fine as I’ll have the burn in to go by) the timecode should be the same and I should be able to substitute the new files at will. But again, I’m very new to FCP and timecode is not something I know much about.
So, does my reasoning seem fairly sound, or just a waste of time? Thanks again for the help!
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