Urgent problem with corrupt Red files

[Jonas Spitzenhuber]

Hi everybody!

 

I just found myself in an urgent problem with the material we've recently shot with a red one. I am not sure if it comes from mishandling or a technical error, anyways its quite depressing. If anyone could help i am really happy..

 

Here is the case:

 

We shot a student short film recently, the last two days using a Red OneMx and 16GB Red CF Cards. The material of Day01 is all ok. The material of Day02 is a completely mess. It seems that the first 8 Cards out of ten have only clips on them not just with corrupt frames, but with just a lot of frames missing. I've tried REdCineX in different versions on 5 different computers, but the always program crashes within a minute after counting hundrets of damaged frames. Same to Premiere CS5.

The material played back well from the camera on set(!). The cards were unmounted properly (says the AC). The files were copied by a rather unexperienced person just by drag and drop in finder, but the bin structure is ok and the amount of data doesnt look like files are missing (Data volume close to 16GB on a cards that ran out..). Unfortunately we havent had a real DIT for the last two days..

 

The cards went back to the rental house were they've been formatted inside the camera and went back to stock. Since then they werent rented out so i hope to be able to restore the data using redundead software and see if the frames were already missing on the cf cards. the pity is, that the rental owns more than 100 cards that are unnumbered so i will have to go all trough them being able to use ten imac computers at the same time ..

 

The point is that it's the first and the last scene of the film that we've lost and it is hardly repeatable since the whole set was built and doesn't exist anymore.

 

That's the situation so far.

 

Before i get stuck in endless stupid computer work, some questions .. you'll recognize that i am not much of a postpro pro

 

- whats happening here?

- Can you imagine clips to get that kind of a damage during a wrong copy process?

- Can you imagine clips to get that kind of a damage being not unmounted properly?

- Do you have any other program in mind that i could try out?

- Do you have any other ideas?

 

Thanks for any advices!

Best, Jonas

[Jonas Spitzenhuber]

Fortunately it all turned out to be good!

 

It was easier than expected to get the cards back from the rental. They werent even formated since we've used them. The clips on the CF cards do all work well, i think the error occured because of mishalndling during the copy process. Still i am not sure what could be done wrong in copying files from one disk to another..

 

Anyways, thanks for the interest!

Enjoy, Jonas

[Adrian Sierkowski]

Problems such as this often come down to a bad card reader.

There are proper programs which will allow you to do a checksum on the cards as they copy which should be used, not being a DIT myself, I can't name specific ones.

Also your DIT should be spot-checking after it's copies in REDCine on set to make sure you don't format a card that errored out.

[Mike Lary]

Jonas,

 

This was probably (almost definitely) caused by the CF card reader. All the readers I've tested, with the exception of Red's, have trouble maintaining data integrity during copy operations. The corruptions seem random because you can sometimes run several cards through the same reader, or even run the same card through the same reader, without problems, then suddenly a corruption happens. You won't have this problem with Red's CF card readers because they were designed specifically to address this problem.

 

Adrian mentioned checksum programs. For Red footage, R3D Data Manager works great. It will not only checksum, but also copy to multiple destinations simultaneously. The only drawback is that it takes a lot longer than a straight copy, but you'll save time if copying to multiple destinations.