So, about 3 years ago, I had a serious hard drive failure and my main multimedia storage drive ate itself. This was my big-gun. About 1 TB of very speedy storage that housed all of the remnant uncompressed video from various projects. Now, you must recall, even 2 years ago, 1 TB of storage was hard to come by and expensive. Back then, Western Digital wasn’t selling 1 TB drives for $200 a pop and if you were trying to utilize multi-stream uncompressed HD for Final Cut or Premiere, you had to invest in serious RAID platforms. Such was the case. No mirroring, no fault tolerance. Just unbridled speedy storage. And it died…

The problem is/was that this drive was home to all the color correction renders of Adrian’s old film, and all of the source renders out from After Effects of the animatic. So, the prime uncompressed HD renders of the animatic were toast. And I never had a chance to reconnect with the materials to re-render. The project timed out for a time while we were waiting for some matters to clear up, and Cyan had already seen everything, so reconstitution was not a priority. And considering the fact that around that time my outside work load went from 40 to 65 hours a week - things just fell by the wayside.

When I started going through our archives to prep content for release on this site, I knew this history was going to pose a problem. We had only one master image in possession of the animatic and as this was before the big wave of H.264, it had been ripped and archived in MPEG-2/DVD format. (For those non-tech types who aren’t already asleep, DVD format is hugely lossy and destructive - about 20% of your original material is lost in the rip. The format only saves what it considers data that’s changed between frames. This is how they fit full movies on one disc.) This problem became very clear when I started importing material for the presentation rip that came out a few weeks ago. A lot of it had to be reconstructed. Dead frames (which translate into bright red frames that have nothing but flat color in them) were all over the place. I had to tween and cut, and dupe frames to keep Adrian from blinking rapidly into a large red square. The first time I previewed it, I nearly had a seizure. And when I scrubbed to the animatic section of the presentation? There was corrupt data all over the place. Boards were getting in the way of the title sequences, black matte was flashing back to frames seen 30 seconds ago — it was a mess. So, I knew, that I was going to have to do some research, and set aside a time to find a better solution, or plan to re-render the entire thing from scratch material (which could easily take days of unbroken attention). Days we don’t have right now with everything going on.

Tonight, I had a breakthrough.

It’s taken a couple of odd hours here and there over the last several weeks researching the best ways to recapture original material from MPEG-2 format, but I finally found something that does the trick - and it’s open source. These obsessed C++ programmers certainly know their way around cracking the MPEG-2 codec to source from to really work with the bits and bytes. After just a little finagling with Handbrake (written by a collection of brilliant French programmers), which I found through reading the Creative COW forums, I could see the solution had come to light. The animatic has now been fully restored in just a simple 7 minute 4-core pass. And it’ll be ready to go as soon as I prep it into web format.

Now, I know what you’re asking. Why the hell am I telling you all of this? Well, because it’s a rant. Technology had me down, and I pwned it. And I had to say something. Just ’cause.

EDIT: Just a typo…um…typos (typoes?)…whatever

2:49 am

tags: after effects, animatic, dvd, geek, handbrake, mpeg-2