Archive for the ‘data loss’ tag

Trust me, I’m a scientist.

Tuesday night my friend Silas brought over his cut of the latest project for Praxis Church. We talked about some changes, how I would have done this different, how we could improve upon that, or add in something else. The data was transferred to Tome, my cheap but trusted external hard drive. This drive got me through most of film school and was where I kept almost all of my current work. I moved the drive from my Macbook Pro over to my PC so I could open a Premiere Pro project (I hate Premiere with every cell in my body, just FYI) and then decided not to open that Premiere project. I could explain this, but I promise the story would just get even more nerdy (boring) so I’ll skip that.
I use software called Mac Drive to read/write my Mac (HFS+) hard drive in Windows. This software no doubt employs some sort of dark magic gained by a deal with the devil and any decent professional only trusts it so far. But what the heck, it sorta works and I’m smarter than all those other pros. Right? No, I’m dumb. I pushed my luck, and when Windows was taking forever to shut down, I just pulled the plug. Yeah, we’re all told this is bad, but in reality there is only a small chance of getting hosed by it. And in this instance I did in fact get completely screwed over.

I kid you not, I feel like data loss is the worst thing than can happen in my profession. Yes, getting cheated by a client is bad, simply being without work is terrible. However, there is really nothing that devastates me like a drive that won’t mount, won’t repair and won’t rebuild.

I tried all the tricks I’ve got and then when I still couldn’t get it to mount I went into full freakout mode for a couple hours. I have a backup and archival system in place but, with the amount of data I’ve accumulated for Praxis projects in the last year, I hadn’t kept up. Nothing was in danger of being completely lost, thankfully I’m more responsible than that. I pride myself on keeping everything pertinent to a project, I love having the freedom to change a shot for my reel, or resurrect a cut for a client. You have to have some decent luck to keep that up though. My luck ran out and I lost 6 projects. I still have the master renders, I still have much of the capture scratch, but the project files, images, effects and color grading is all lost.

Meh, I let this sort of thing bother me way too much. Overall this year has been sorta lame. Other than BSU’s win I can’t say a lot of good has happened.
Which is bull shit, I shouldn’t have such a bad attitude. My life is rather kick ass, by even first world standards.
lol, that’s a terrible way of quantifying happiness.

I now live in a world temporarily without Jay Leno. So, I guess it can’t get much better.

Here is the video that was first mentioned in this post. Silas did all the real post production work, even without my drive crashing I quickly realized how terrible it was of me to want to change things. I won’t even say what I wanted to change, because it’s immaterial. Silas had finally gotten the chance to edit a video and he did a great job. It’s his edit with some normal changes from the rest of the team and it’s fantastic.

Identifying your Apocalypse – Survivor’s Guide to the Apocalypse. from Praxis Church on Vimeo.

The new sermon series is about the end of the world and thankfully it’s not some silly study of a movie including Kirk Cameron. It’s just an overview of the different theories with an emphasis on what really matters, not scary, imaginative theology. The videos however, are informational and made with the highest attention to biblical, historical and cinematic accuracy. :)

If you can figure out the source of the video’s music without looking at the description you’re my new favorite person.