Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Short List of the Events of the Last Twenty-Four Hours

12:00am - Wednesday - Finishing up project to be burned to DVD the next morning. The product of 2 months of work.

9:00am - Wednesday - Plug in drive to begin working on Project DVD, get an instant message hear a click and an electro-static noise. Get an error message saying, "improper device removal."

9:30am - Panic sets in as I realize all 11 hours of footage has gone offline. Panic more when the power button on the 500gig Lacie drive that I have borrowed does not work.

10:00am - Try to stay calm, try to find our IT guys.

11:00am - Open up the project backup and try to relink the footage that I have backed up to another drive. Panic again as I realize that I only backed up 4 hours out of 11 hours of footage.

12:00pm through 7:00pm - Everything I touch is falling apart in my hands, footage is not relinking. Pay $65 to rent an HDV camera, footage will not redigitize correctly. Learn that the hardrive is dead. Go to the Apple store and spend $370 to replace the drive that just died, because it didn't belong to me.

8:00pm through 10:30pm - Hang out with friends try to remain calm. Drink a Carlsberg and talk about the Bible.

10:30pm - Come back to the office, delete the 6 hours of recovery work from that afternoon and start fresh, create a new project backup using Final Cuts "Media Management feature" in which a new project is created using only the selections in your timeline, begin to recapture new offline clips.

12:31pm - Thursday - Official last day at work. Read and try to stay awake as I feed tapes into the HDV camera.

To sum up, I spent about $470 today and lost a large amount of the work that I having been consumed by for 2 months. It could be worse though. If I hadn't backed up the Final Cut project file before I left last night, much more could have been lost.

*Moral Of The Story - Back up your projects constantly, and never ever trust hardrives, especially Lacie hardrives.

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