FS7: FS7 XQD needs RECOVERY HELP!

Like a lot of people, I use Finder to copy. I somehow had an issue a a few years ago(don't remember the camera/card) and I did a drag 'n drop from the card to the back-up folder. When it was done, the card was empty. What?! The data was in the back-up location, but the card showed nothing on it. After that, I've always tried to make a conscious effort to Copy 'n Paste instead of just Drag 'n Drop.
 
Did you guys ever figure this out? We just had this pop up on a shoot, too. And it went very similarly:

Guy unloading the footage went to put our last card of the day into the computer. When he opened his laptop, it still showed the previous card as mounted (it wasn't. the card reader was empty.) so he simply slid the latest card into the card reader. When he double clicked the disk on his desktop, it opened in a Finder window and looked exactly like the structure (and file sizes) of the card prior.

We put the card back into the camera and it said it needed to be recovered. So I said OK and it said "recovering..." for a really, really long time. The message never went away. So I decided to power off the camera. The power switch didn't shut off the camera, so I ended up having to pull the battery. Tried recovery again, gave an error message. Tried a third time and it said it worked but all the clips lacked thumbnails and had the "no" logo over the play symbol. Then I tried doing update media. Nothing is seeming to make footage show up.

Now here's a weird thing, though: I tried opening an MXF file with MplayerX on my Mac and it said "Oops, Mplayer quit before playing the video." and I click OK... Then, a small (non-4K, looks about standard def sized on my screen) video OF ONE OF OUR SHOTS pops up and starts playing! This is a shot that we are trying to recover. So I feel like there is hope, the content lives on this card, it just can't seem to be accessed.

Any guidance for recovering it? The card I was using is a Lexar card and they give out recovery software with the cards, but that didn't work.
 
Josh- reach out to Juan Martinez. PM the OP of this thread and see if he will provide you with information he obtained as to where to send the card for possibly saving.

Is there any consensus as to whether Red Giant Offload adds any level of safety beyond using Sony Catalyst to offload media?

Any reason for me to spend $99 on RG Offload?
 
Josh,
I sent my card to Sony in NJ for over a month and they got nowhere. Have no idea what happened. I now never use drag and drop. Always use Catalyst Browse to download cards. I guess one lesson from your experience is never put a card in a computer if something looks fishy to begin with . I hate that there is no write protection on these cards.
Good luck
lenny
 
I ran some software called Treasured (http://aeroquartet.com/movierepair/download#) and it looks like it was finding all the clips we are missing... the big catch though is that they charge like $299 for a clip or $799 for a card for the recovery. This shoot was a small crew, all unpaid (passion project, short film). Our location was a little bit of a pain (rooftop, so it was a pain to get gear up, no elevator or stairs, it was a utility ladder), but the clips we are missing were only about 45 minutes of our production day. Sucks because they are critical to the short, but not sure if the guys I was shooting for are willing to fork out $800 to save those clips. I'll see what else I can do. I ran some recovery software that managed to find a bunch of metadata XML files for the clips we are missing and I saw all the thumbnails in that Treasured app, so that's promising.
 
Save the card. If those could find it then Sony probably can and they likely won't charge you. I agree to get in touch with <Juan.A.Martinez@am.sony.com>. He is a great guy and really cares about customer service and problem solving.
 
I just advised Morgan on another thread not to drag and drop.. Shot put pro is the way to go.. I cant believe people will spend alot of money on gear ..but not shell out $100 or so to make sure their footage is down loaded ok..
 
JPNola said:
Josh- reach out to Juan Martinez. PM the OP of this thread and see if he will provide you with information he obtained as to where to send the card for possibly saving.

Is there any consensus as to whether Red Giant Offload adds any level of safety beyond using Sony Catalyst to offload media?

Any reason for me to spend $99 on RG Offload?
Click to expand...


I have Offload. I think it does filesize checks plus it has instant preview on the target drives to double check.
 
Hey Folks,

Resolve 12 and later has a clone feature which lets one clone cards or folders to multiple locations with a crc check. Shotput Pro does more checking but you can download Resolve for free. Once again I would suggest folks spend some time learning Resolve. One can do round trips to most NLE's and when back to Resolve one can reconnect to the original media for color correction and delivery and therefore minimize generation loss. And of course the editing tools are good enough for most short projects.

Keep in mind the free version will input DCI 4K but will only allow output of UHD or lower.

I am not anyone's employee nor compensated to endorse products.

Y'all take care,
Robert
 
Donny 123 said:
I just advised Morgan on another thread not to drag and drop.. Shot put pro is the way to go.. I cant believe people will spend alot of money on gear ..but not shell out $100 or so to make sure their footage is down loaded ok..
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have software for it, but I wasn't playing DIT on this shoot. God this is such a weird issue. Lexar had never heard of it. I will send Juan Martinez an email, but it was a Lexar card we were using so I'm not sure if they'll be supporting. I have Sony cards, too, this just happened to be a Lexar. Sounds like people have had this issue on Sony cards, as well, so it's not like it's isolated to the brand.
 
jshbckr said:
Yeah, I have software for it, but I wasn't playing DIT on this shoot. God this is such a weird issue. Lexar had never heard of it. I will send Juan Martinez an email, but it was a Lexar card we were using so I'm not sure if they'll be supporting. I have Sony cards, too, this just happened to be a Lexar. Sounds like people have had this issue on Sony cards, as well, so it's not like it's isolated to the brand.
Click to expand...

Sorry didnt want to come off like i was blaming you personally.. was just a general comment.. even worse in a way though if you had a DIT who was drag and dropping ! hope you get sorted out.. must be really frustrating these weird out of world type problems..
 
Here's one + for just using Catalyst to me . You can tell you're client to get it for free and then use their computer instead of always bringing your laptop to the job. Also you can look at the shots in it.

Bad side - so far it can't transpose 4K to 4K ProRes (including UHD), though it can copy your XAVC. How dumb is that Sony?
 
I thought the free Cat B didnt have a hash check when copying.. Content Browse did, I think I remember.. also Cat B is only to one destination at a time isnt it..? SPP is very good even more so with V6.. I use Cat B for looking at footage if I need to.. also an advantage to get a down load report that SPP does.. sometimes needed for insurance ..
 
I found a recent addition to the OSX file copy & verification pack called Hedge, and I'd recommend checking it out. They have a demo version and paid version, with full checksum verification at equal-to-or-faster speeds than native Finder copy/paste.

The real killer feature though is the ability to copy/verify to two destination drives simultaneously, which can decrease your waiting time dramatically if you're in a situation where you're waiting for cards.

It also has a super-simple and intuitive interface. Perfect for those late-night, running-on-fumes moments. :-)

-jason
 
Lenilenapi said:
Josh,
was you problem on a Mac or PC?
Click to expand...

It was a Mac.

I think we are going to end up paying that AeroQuartet company (they make the app Treasured that I mentioned). There are some weird glitches at the beginning/end of takes sometimes but never in the middle of a take, so everything we need is 100% quality.

It's really kind of mind-blowing how it works. I downloaded Treasured and scanned our corrupted card with it. It found a ton of thumbnails for our missing clips (the app walks you through all of this), and you select the shots you want to recover and then there is a "submit repair request" button, and it uploads information to AeroQuartet. It doesn't send the footage, just the information they need to repair it I guess. Then they sent me a customized RepairKit app that I ran again on the corrupted card. It took like 5 hours or something but when it was done I was able to watch full-res playback of the footage with a watermark on it. They footage didn't exist in "clips" anymore, it's all basically one big blob of footage that you have to scrub through and some stuff is out of order, but I'll take what I can get at this point!

One thing that was slightly annoying (just wanted to fill you in on this in case you tried using the app) is that the recovered footage can ONLY be reviewed on the computer that ran the RepairKit app. The footage is also a weird ".trial" filetype. I tried copying the .trial file to a hard drive to bring to the director to review and it wouldn't open on a different computer.

Basically the guys I was filming with have decided that it would be better for them to pay the repair cost than to ask everyone (who was already shooting the short for free) to spend another half-day reshooting. On Tuesday the director is coming over to do a final footage check and then we'll pay to have the footage unlocked. Apparently it's just an instant code that gives you access to the recovered file. Pretty awesome that they found a way that didn't require any massive file transfers or mailing cards/hard drives.
 
Wow Pretty good luck and good to know its possible. What was the cost?

In my case we were extraordinarily lucky in that it was just a speaker at at technical event and the client never requested that speaker. They don't even know we screwed up.

Lenny
 
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