OT: How to ruin my whole day

Crap.

Bet ya Disk Warrior can handle it

Michael Horton
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Oh, it did. All is well. But still, when something like that happens, it just sucks the wind right out of my sails.

Looks different from other directory failures I've seen, but worth a shot. But you do have a dilemma -- in my experience, a serious failure not limited to a directory corruption can be exacerbated rather than fixed by DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro.

So now you have to decide: Do you backup your data first (and if you have enough data on there, the drive could conk out before you're done), or do you run DiskWarrior/TechTool Pro/Disk Utility first?

Either way carries risks. But usually I'm for backing up first. Maybe you could meet halfway -- backup project files, smaller "brain" files that contain editing decisions, etc., and non-timecoded media. Hopefully you'll be able to complete those operations before the drive fails. Then run the utilities.


www.derekmok.com

Good suggestions all, Derek, but what really happened was a little different.

First, I had a kernel panic. I'm using a Tascam 1082 Firewire audio doohickey, and something about the combination causes my system to kernel panic occasionally. In this case, I was reaching around to unplug my cans and I accidentally hit the power switch on the mixer. When I turned it back on, bam. Kernel panic.

When I rebooted, I got the error seen above. My first thought was "crap, I spent good money on a RAID-5 framestore to prevent this kind of thing." Then I ran Disk Utility's first aid on it. It coughed up a bunch of catalog-related errors.

No problem, thought I. Disk Warrior eats bad catalogs for breakfast. I ran it, and everything was fine.

But yes, if things had been different, I absolutely would have backed up my project files and whatnot, then wiped the framestore. I'm glad I didn't have to.

(Note to self: Look for a tool or program or something that will automatically back up any file ending in dot-fcp.)

Yeah, this is why I refuse to use FireWire-based mixers and audio interfaces. USB appears to be fine, and I still like good ol' analog mixers. I've seen this FireWire problem dating back as far as 2001 when Sony's DSR-20 decks -- with their lovely "power save" automatic turn-off feature -- fried the FireWire drives of about 50 film students from my school, all within a week, and caused a mini-panic. That's when DiskWarrior made its name there.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah, I hear you about the Firewire I/O stuff, but I love my 1082. If it could cook, I would marry it.

How to ruin my day....

"Here are a bunch of interviews...not transcribed...that are really boring and they UHM and AAAH a lot. I need you to cut a show using only what they say...and make it GOOD. I have to write a script for the other two shows...that have much better footage and more exciting characters. Oh, but I have seen your work...you are good. So make these crappy interviews shine.

"And we don't have very much if any b-roll, because we were denied access. But still, this has to be very good. You are on your own for 2 months...good luck."

Joy.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

Wow, Shane. Do you have microphones hidden in my room or something?

Hee.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
[itunes.apple.com]

They should replace that red stop sign / exclamation point with a middle finger. It's more appropriate with the "kick in the sack" feeling you get when that screen pops up.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

How about this:

Forty-two minutes of car footage on Beta SP -- not DigiBeta, Beta -- comes in. Not great, but usable. And at least it wasn't our company that shot it.

Then the agency says:

"We don't want to show the car."

So...30 seconds of commercial are filled with 23 seconds of...offline stock footage.

And guess how many versions we had to go through? Twenty-four.

I made a load of money, but I was this close to picking up a chainsaw. By contrast, the general-market spots with nice footage tends to take only half a day for the first cut and a quarter day per version after that. And I don't think I ever went beyond eight versions per spot until this sucker.


www.derekmok.com

If we're gonna reenact the scene from "Jaws" here, how about this one:

Client calls up the Wednesday before Veterans Day and says, "We'd like a motivational video to open our conference next Thursday. And we have no footage."

I've got the opposite problem here - one of those 'it's got to be done immediately or we lose the guarantee money - go faster!' OK. Can do. Work stupid hours and on weekends.

Now it's all ready to go to tape and disk but they're waiting on some logos and photos from the client and it's been a WEEK since the 'people's heads will explode' deadline. Uhm. Sure. That's obviously a really important deadline I busted for there..

We need an 'editors whine' lounge.

This is my editors whine lounge.

Michael Horton
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Mike,

Isn't that your overnight bag?

Sorry...that's Ben I'm thinking of. I get confused sometimes

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Michael Horton Wrote:
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> [i16.photobucket.com]
> r5.jpg
>
> This is my editors whine lounge.

Hey! You're running low on Cacique Guaro!

--
Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
---------------------------------
[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
[twitter.com]

Very happy to hear that was solved, Jeff. That would send me ashen.

Shane wrote-
["And we don't have very much if any b-roll, because we were denied access. But still, this has to be very good. You are on your own for 2 months...good luck." ]

So... you got work, eh?

BTW, I've done scads of verbatim transcription, it's a thankless task-- except I had B-roll and every one of the shows I transcribed were big prizewinners. Huh!

Now I hear from Jeff Greenberg (FMC) there's a group in India which does cost-effective transcription! I'm looking into it.

Mike H. wrote-
[This is my editors whine lounge.]

In the reflection of the bottles I can see the clear outline of your future liver transplant!

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Copy a clip, Paste Overwrite with Command-V, but
Paste Insert with Shift- V !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

> Now I hear from Jeff Greenberg (FMC) there's a group in India which does cost-effective
> transcription! I'm looking into it.

Or indulge in what the last LAFCPUG meeting's presenters showed us: Adobe Premiere Pro's automatic transcriber. While it isn't perfect, if it even gets 50 per cent of the words right, it's a time-saver. And with some audio, if it's obscure enough that the software can't figure it out, you can't guarantee an assistant editor would be able to nail it either, anyway.


www.derekmok.com

I read a blog post this week sometime, I forget where ? Shane, was it you? ? that said the automatic transcriber in Premiere is okay and all, but you can't get a timecoded transcript out of it. I've got some interview footage at the office that's broken up into questions-and-answers, with answers being about two to six minutes long, and my CS4 upgrade is sitting in a drawer waiting for me to install it on another partition, so maybe I'll give it a try over the Christmas break. But what I've heard, generally, is that it's not much of a time-saver.

I'll report back after I've experimented.

We need some jazz in the corner....





www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah, Derek...you are talking about PP's "Speech To Text". Amazing - I saw it in action with Dave Helmly reading from a newspaper. The cool thing about that is even if it gets some words wrong, you can go in immediately and correct the spelling of those words without affecting the timing.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Hi Michael: I see you've got Knockando Single Malt on your top shelf. Here in Glasgow, we tend to reach for it when the answer to a problem appears to be "No can do ..."

3Ghz Dual Core MacPro, FCS 2