[Dinis Rodrigues]

Problem solved 🙂

A bit unexpected but makes sense.
It was the harddrive dock.
All the files were copied fine but, when they are read now, they are passing misinformation, giving origin to those artifacts. Changed dock and all the material was there and fine.

Thanx for your help and great insight.

[Dinis Rodrigues]

Hi Gary

Thanks for the great insight.
I wasn’t aware of that flaw on exFAT hard drives. I also completely agree with you on the backup issue, and me and the DP tend to warn of those risks to the production, but sometimes they underestimate it.
Those individual block failures must also have happened post copying, as we would have detected them while copying during those couple seconds of playback.
I guess now we have a story to tell next time they insist on no backup.

Also, do you know how to recover footage from cards formatted on camera?
I tried like 5 different recovering pieces of software, they all came empty, even on the longer methods. The formatted card is named ARRI_UDF, which is normal with all formatted cards and was formatted with the “format card” quicker method.

[Dinis Rodrigues]

Yes. I mean, not me, the hard drive is on the post-house at the moment. I’m getting it and testing it on monday.
They were the ones finding out that across all the videoclips there is the same problem.
It’s possible to copy the file to other media, which is strange. The image uploaded here was a picture from a file that was sent to me by sprend, so technicaly they were able to upload it on internet and I was able to download it.

All the problems I ever had with dying/damaged harddrives were either physical problems where you can ear it and can’t even read/copy the whole file or corruption on the mbr part which can be recreated and the files recovered.
I’m not hard drive expert, of course, but this seems like something was written over on some sectors. I’m thinking about, on monday, copying a healthy large file to the hard drive and then copying it back and play it, to check if it’s the hard drive fault or if something happened after I gave away the hard drive. Do you have any other suggestions, as I didn’t know a thing like this could happen?
Could it be a virus or a sort of magnet that touched the drive?

I also found out today that when the alexa formats a card (not “erase card”), even though it takes just a couple seconds, it is a destructive format, unlike when you format a normal harddrive or card through the operative system. It seems that the Alexa also randomly writes all around the card to make it impossible to undelete/unformat it.

[Dinis Rodrigues]

Hi Gary.
It was on SXS.
The transfer was done with a thunderbolt cardreader to a usb docked drive.
Being low budget and short-staffed, there was no backup.
After checking the same kind of errors on recorded sound, it seems to be the hard drive.
There was a couple short checks here and there, and the size of the card was checked with the size on disk after every transfer.
The files were seen on a mac, both vlc and quicktime, then one of them was sprended to me, seen on pc (quicktime and premiere).

As the cards seem to playback fine on camera, I’m left believing there was damaging throughout the harddrive. It just doesn’t make sense how, as mechanical-wise, the hard drive seems to function fine. It’s like something was copied over the hard drive space, over the files, but how does that happen…?
The harddrive is formatted as exFAT by the way.

[Dinis Rodrigues]

Thanks for the reply.
I have no idea how it happened, but I see now that the audio got the same problem, so it’s gotta be the hard drive. We previewed a couple seconds here and there, same with the audio, no problems then. Something must have happened after the shooting up to the beginning of the editing for all the files to have that kind of damage, just no idea what.