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Reconnecting after drive failure & file recovery
Recently we had a massive drive failure, but have fortunately been able to recover much of the original video clips that were shot to cards using a JVC HD camera, dumped straight to these drives, and then used to edit in FCP.
The recovery, while wonderful, pulls back these original files, rebuilds them, but also renames them from the original file names, so an original clip that sits in our timeline and was called xyz, is now called QTmovie123. So now we are left trying to manually reconnect original clips to time line edits. We highlight an edit in the time line, then start looking at the newly named files until we get a match, we are having luck but wow, what a long process. Is there another trick to speed this up ?
Thanks in advance
Dave
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5 Replies
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How was this footage brought in initially? JVC camera, so already QT files? So you brought them over, and then renamed them? Or am I reading that wrong?
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Hi Shane, thanks for picking up on the post.
The JVC HD GY 700U records straight to cards, but I believe the files it records are wrapped in QT, so as soon as the files are dropped from the cards to a drive they are ready to edit in FCP immediately – no log and capture needed.
So what we did is exactly that. We shot, dropped camera original material to drives (didn’t bother renaming them) then imported them into FCP project and started editing. So they were called exactly what the camera labeled them during recording, both on the drives and in the time line. Those drives containing the camera original files went down, but we have been able to recover many camera original files using software, however the recovery software happens to rebuild and then automatically rename these camera original files. So now I have files named differently in the timeline, to the recovered files (which are the camera original files but named something new by the software). The new files seem to have the correct time code information, but the names are mismatched.
Dave
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You may want to look at FCPReconnect to see if it can help you out. Other forum members have had a lot of success with it and DSLR footage reconnecting with similar issues. Personally have not used it, so I cannot speak with first hand knowledge.
https://www.videotoolshed.com/product/41/fcpreconnect/3
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I know the camera shoots to Quicktime files. So are you telling us that you lost the drive with the camera originals? That you only had ONE drive with this footage? No archive master? That was a pretty bad decision.
With tapeless you don’t have a tape that you can capture and then put on a shelf. So if a drive died, you simply recapture the tape. No…tapeless is recorded to media that is re-used, because it is too expensive to archive them. So what you do is backup the camera originals to other media…like hard drives, LTO drives. And you put those on a shelf. But you have copies, or media imports, that you have on your CAPTURE SCRATCH. So the media would live in two locations…on the archive drive and the media drive.
Are you saying that you ONLY had the media on the media drive? You did not have them backed up anywhere? That’s not good. And now you see why.
I too highly recommend FCP Reconnect. As long as the timecode is intact, FCP Reconnect should be able to connect the clips to the media.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Correct, camera originals on the drive that crashed, and believe me we have the correct tools to ensure this didn’t happen, including a raid drive with redundancy (two drives failed at the same time) and a Quantum LTO4 system to archive everything as a disaster recovery backup. What we didn’t have, was anyone wrangling the media in the system correctly or in a timely fashion. Brutal ! Drives are at Disk Savers hoping to recover the data, but we recovered a lot of media on our own from a variety of places. This media does indeed have TC, so we will try FCPreconnect.
Dave
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