[Tom Carlson]

I can personally vouch for Matt. He has been able to recover files for me that weren’t recoverable even with a working Mezzo license. Every single time! His rate is quite reasonable and well worth every penny spent on his services.

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Thanks for the post, Makin.

It turns out they were data tapes. After much hacking of headers and lots of new software, I was able to determine they were backups from a Lightworks machine! 8K audio and low rez picture. I was able to restore all of the audio, but we determined that without a Lightworks from the period, there was no getting the picture back. It wasn’t mission critical, so we left it for another generation to restore, if they so desire.

Thanks for the suggestion for further research! I’ll save that for sure.

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Great. I’ll give that a shot and let you know if it turns out any better.

I would assume that using the Avid to do the conversion would be better than ffmpeg or Sorenson Squeeze? If only for the GUI?

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Thanks so much for that information, Michael. Yes, for reference only, but I always like to know what is possible to improve quality, because one never knows what will be asked for next.

I’ve noticed one thing is that the film tends to stop one frame every second or so. It reminds me of when we used to look at NTSC footage on a Pal rig where they just repeated the 24th frame…or was that the other way around? At any rate, once a second, it’s almost like an extra frame has been added so the motion isn’t as smooth as it could be.

I found the motion was slightly better overall using Photo – JPEG, which is a very old trick from back in the SD days. But not enough to make a big difference. All in all looks rather crap anyway compared to how the Blu ray title looks on an HD TV, but that is to be expected, I suppose. I’m thinking the jerkiness might be more of a QuickTime issue or Pro Tools issue than a transcoding issue? Both QT and PT have the same playback issue, particularly noticeable on panning or tracking shots. Playing back from an SSD Raid and using an NVIDIA Quadro K5000, so I think those should be adequate. However, I am still on a mid-2010 Mac Pro (5,1) 2.93 GHz 12 core, so maybe that has something to do with it?

The original-original source was an animated film from 1997, for which a Blu-ray master was made just a few years ago. I could probably go to the studio and get an output of something for my ref, but that would be a hassle for something that is really just a convenience. For now, the DNX HD should be absolutely fine, unless you know of a way to change the settings in Squeeze Pro so that the final output plays more smoothly.

Thanks again!

[Tom Carlson]

Thanks, Joseph! That answers my question. I have since talked this recipient into having their department purchase a small Pro Tools system, so that they can interface with the music editors that work with them. Just budgeting it now and they’ll come on into the 21st century.

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Yup! What he said!

By the way Tim, huge kudos to your support department over there. Mike spent a good part of yesterday helping me sort through some issues I was having TTT (mostly my own fault) and was most patient and explained things clearly and concisely. Worth the price of admission right there!!!

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Hi Bob,

Actually I did buy Tolis Tape Tools today and it works fine. I was just trying to see if there was a way of restoring the TAR files without shelling out more money. I’ve got Retrospect on my main system, and that was grabbing the LTO-5 drive and not allowing TTT to see it, so I just installed the Tools on another boot drive that I have on that computer that is “clean.” After fussing around with it a bit and with the help of the great support staff at Tolis (thanks, Mike!) I got it working and restored the LTO perfectly. MD5 files match and we’re good to go!

Now, if I can figure out how to restore some old tapes that were backed up with Mezzo! Arghhhh! You don’t have a copy you’d like to sell, do you, Bob?

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Thanks, Jonathan. That’s exactly the information I was looking for!

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Thanks, Scott. That should work.

I found one workaround, which was to make sure that there was a key at the end of the clip, and then copy all the parameters and paste them at the beginning of the next clip. I believe your way will be a more elegant way to do this.

Tom

[Tom Carlson]

Thanks, Nei. I’ll give it a try.