COLOR RENDERS ERASED - PROJECT HELP

Imac 3.6 intel 2008 snow leopard/ FCP7.0.3

Okay, after 3 days with Apple Care tech support, one of the geniuses corrupted the disc image of the hard drive he ERASED. And yes, get it over with, I never backed up anything but project files and capture scratch. Color Renders all stayed on the HD and they are gone baby gone. Their senior advisors tried everything to no avail but did offer to send it out somewhere to try and recover files. But project was due 3 days ago and I have to finish by Monday or I lose LOTS of money which Apple Customer Relations won't compensate.

Anyway, right now I can open my project and most everything is missing. All the clips labeled 1-G1 etc are all missing and it says media offline. Luckily all the filters are still there because I spent 3 weeks animating Sapphire Edge plug ins. But the clips do have the name, no thumbnail, of the original media files - MVI 3708 Pro Res etc. Now I can go in and reconnect my clips to that original media file by deselecting matched name and volume and type in the number on that clip in the timeline.

What I would like to know, since I have hundreds of clips, is there a way to reconnect them all at the same time?

And since I had to reinstall color and FCP7, am I SOL on all that color work I did?

Thank you!!!

> But the clips do have the name, no thumbnail, of the original media files - MVI 3708 Pro Res etc. Now I can go in and reconnect my clips to that original
> media file by deselecting matched name and volume and type in the number on that clip in the timeline.

Why would you need to? Judging from your file name, you had master camera clips from a Canon DSLR which were then converted to ProRes for editing. That should mean you should be able to mount the original volumes of the camera masters, re-ingest the clips (whose converted names should have been saved in the metadata of your camera masters, if you had done this correctly), and reconnect the media.

If for some bizarre reason you can't re-create the clips with their old names intact (which is a crucial step in assistant-editor work), then there is no way to reconnect more than one clip at a time. You'd have to override the media relationships manually on each clip.

Why were your rendered clips in your system drive, anyway? The system drive is the last place you should put any large clips with heavy FX. You should have been using an external drive for this, and to have no backups of irrecoverable FX work is your own fault. Drive corruptions could happen even if you do nothing wrong. It's your workflow that is causing your grief. If you do this much crucial, high-paying FX work, you should be working off a RAID storage system with multiple redundancies, anyway, plus daily backups to a drive on top of the RAID.


www.derekmok.com

YEAH YEAH YEAH

Good evening Mr. EWB.

I'm unsure as to how familiar you are with FCS, but render files do have a habit of disconnecting even under normal circumstances.

I don't use COLOR myself, but imagine that the same issue exists there.

It's a little difficult to tell from your post whether your FCP render files have been disconnected too but, assuming that is so, I regret to tell you from 12 years of working in FCP that once a render file goes west, it isn't worth even attempting to reconnect. Well, that's my experience.

Would I be telling you something you already know if I suggested that you highlight your Timeline in sections of a couple of minutes each and then go to RECONNECT MEDIA? It won't get your render files back, but if the picture and sound files are present on your computer and have the same names with which you edited them, you will be able to reconnect and then re-render.

As an aside, I suggest doing this in relatively short sections because my experience is that FCP can get all sulky and irritable if one highlights the entire Timeline and then attempts the reconnecting thing. But perhaps that's a quirk of my own setup.

This is all appalling and massively disheartening for you. And I realize that our DEREKMOK is a funny old stick and can be a bit bossy at times, but he really knows his stuff and has helped me and many others out on several occasions. He is a well established figure on this board and, for what it's worth, getting snippy with him with YEAH YEAH YEAH is to reject factual advice from this chap. He is, after all, annoyingly correct about your problem.

So, put away the razorblades and get weaving on reconnecting this stuff.

OK?

I wish you well.

Best wishes,

Harry The Idiot.

YEAH YEAH YEAH will have to re-ingest, reconnect and re-render. Easy peasy but time consuming, except that from his post, he doesn't seem to know what reel names are, which makes this operation quite daunting. Best to hire a professional to look at it for a day, and yea, not an apple genius.



www.strypesinpost.com

Dear strypes,

I think you should volunteer for this elementary task.

Harry.

I do appreciate the hazing. Thank you. It hits that real nice spot after 2.5 days dealing with Apple Care and all the (search the internet and forums quickly) remedies that haven't worked. Now they have me trying Data Rescue 3 and I just finished ANOTHER scan and it says that the disc has the same amount of Gigs as the source one that was erased. 400. It just can't find any files. So running a deep scan this time. And Harry, as far as the short bursts in the timeline, I will try that. And yes, I am about to hire someone for a couple hours. Any takers? I'm in West LA and need someone tomorrow or today I guess it is already. And

If you choose to see it as a "hazing", that's up to you. Just know that without the right equipment and work habits, this will happen again.


www.derekmok.com

>I think you should volunteer for this elementary task.

I can, but I'm halfway around the world.


What Derek said is about good post practice, which should always be followed. But I'm not exactly thrilled with the response he got, and frankly, I don't care how urgent the job is, or who should be blamed for that. I personally won't trust Apple support except to replace defective hardware on products under warranty. But this is about troubleshooting, not about Apple or how urgent the project is.

The OP has not mentioned how he ingested the media or what softwares he used. He mentioned Sapphire Edge, which is an FCP plugin, and he mentioned Apple Color, which from the names of the files sound like Color renders. He mentioned that he backed up his Capture Scratch, which I would assume he Log and Transferred all the clips, but he also mentioned that to reconnect the clips he needs to deselect "match name and reel", which seems very strange.

So my guess is that he sent an FCP sequence to Apple Color, and roundtripped it back and did some effects work with Sapphire plugins, before the Geniuses erased his drive. So if he didn't back up the Color Renders and he rendered to his system drive (which is a very weird practice), he has the Color Projects, he can relink to the media and re-render with the exact same settings that he used previously. Better if he can render to the same path as he did previously. Then he can re-connect to the files in FCP. Most of them should re-connect, and for those that can't automatically re-connect due to Color's strange way of naming files, he can manually re-link those files.



www.strypesinpost.com

I've had better luck reconnecting FCP renders of all kinds but as Derek correctly indicates, all those should be directed to a scratch other than your system drive.

EWB, to get more value out of this thread for future reference, what machine model are you working on, and what symptoms caused you to go to the Genius Bar in the first place? I mean, before the Genius reportedly erased the hard drive after making a defective disk image?

Second, when disaster strikes, always check in here first before heading off to the Genius Bar. Somebody here can probably help you with a strategy which avoids Geniuses.

- Loren

Today's FCP keytip:
Set a motion effect keyframe instantly with Control-K!

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide™ Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Re: strypes message:

" ... he has the Color Projects, he can relink to the media and re-render with the exact same settings that he used previously. Better if he can render to the same path as he did previously. Then he can re-connect to the files in FCP. Most of them should re-connect, and for those that can't automatically re-connect due to Color's strange way of naming files, he can manually re-link those files."

Dear Mr. EWB. The above is a promising avenue. Mr. Strypes is massively knowledgeable in such arcane matters, so take heed and try out his advice.

These people are offering solid suggestions which might easily help you out.

You are probably very nice in person, but in writing you come across with an unfortunate style which tempts me to muster my army of big black spiders to creep into your home and bite your feet off in the night.

Hugs,

Harry.

"Somebody here can probably help you with a strategy which avoids Geniuses. "

Love it ...

xxx. Harry.

Probably too late for this, but before doing anything, get into your Color project if you still can and save all your grades, using a folder structure that makes sense for your project. You should then be able to duplicate the ungraded sequence you originally sent to Color, bring it in, drop on the saved grades and render back out again.

Losing the render connections is unfortunately Color's biggest problem area. Although there are some functions in Color that are actually very good, the constant and inexplicable stability issues made the app a rather poor one indeed. Too unreliable. No wonder they simply ditched it with no further comment in the end. But that's another story....

Anyway, the above fix worked for me a few times in worst case scenarios. Maybe give it a try if all else has failed. Then go download Resolve v9 and learn that instead.

Thank you all for your help and suggestions. Hope that doesn't muster the spiders.

I have called them off.

Best wishes,

Harry.

running a regularly updated back-up of all project assets is such a wonderful thing*