Video file degrades over time??

H

Huy Vu

Veteran
I rendered out as final output some avi files in Premiere (don't really remember what setting I used but they weren't uncompressed) for a bunch of separate projects. All of them came out fine when I first rendered them. But about six months to a year later when I reopened them almost all of them were degraded. They all had multicolored square blobs that pops up in certain frames & garbled audio at those frames. Some of them can't even be open or has no audio (i tried VLC, realplayer, window media etc.). I even tried using premiere to open them and it tells me that it doesn't recognize the compression scheme.

The files were stored on two separate hard drives (not the operating system one). The weird thing is that the mpeg files that I rendered out around those times were working fine with no corruption. I get nostalgic from time to time and want to revisit my old projects. Why does this corruption happens? Is there a way that I can restore the old quality? What can I do to keep this from happening to my videos in the future (aside from burning DVDs, I don't really like doing that). I'm also concerned because I tend to keep all of my raw footage (yeah, I'm a pack rat) and those are always in avi format.

Has anyone encountered this problem?
 
The only way the video files were degraded by themselfs would be...none!
Did you opened them with the same versoin of Premiere you used back then?
Possible problems:
- More possibly there is a setting in your edit software and you see preview quality for
the timeline.
- It's obvious that you have formatted your drives or removed some codecs you used back then.
 
The corruption is not of the video it's self, but of the data on the hard drive. Video its’ self cannot degrade over time if it digital. It can however loose data due to the 0's and 1's that make up being lost or corrupted. It could also be that the sectors of the hard drive are going bad. There are some tools out there that can find and fix data in the corrupt sectors and what not. You could give them a try.

I never trust a hard drive alone and back up to DV tape and DVD for all my projects. That gives me at least 2 if not 3 backup sources.

Good luck,

Coder68
 
It almost sounds like whatever codec you used for your avi isn't being fully supported in your current configuration. Do you remember what you rendered as? You might have to rollback or update the codec.
 
I actually did have to reinstall Windows several times and I used version 6.5 to render them while using PP 1.5 to open. I'm very leery of installing new audio/video codec because I never know when those things can screw up Premiere. I had that happened in the past when I would install a codec which would make some of my video work but render others unviewable. The worst part is that sometimes those codec would cause PP 1.5 to refuse to start (which is why I had to reinstall Windows in the first place).

I wonder if hard drive corruption is the problem then why aren't the mpeg files affected but only the avi?
 
It might not be hard drive corruption. Can you upload 1-2 seconds of DV that IS corrupt so someone else can see how it plays on thier system?

Coder68
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top