A Mirroring Story

[Brian Milliken]

Hi All

Deva 5, Running 5.40, Panasonic DVD Rams.

On Wednesday I was recording a Commercial for "STARBURST" sweets, on the banks of the beautiful Loch Fyne at a Dunderave Castle in Scotland. 5 Tracks, 24 Bit, 48K.

Our day started at 05.00 to travel to location from Glasgow for a 07.00 Breakfast, 07.30 on set.

The Script did not look too demanding, however as you know Commercials shoot at times lots of material, so halfway through the day at Segment 99 (approx 4gig) I was beginning to think about changing to my 2nd DVD Ram, I ejected the first then decided to get maybe another 5-10 segments onto it, once re-inserted the DVD Ram would not mount, I was getting the message "waiting for media", after several attempts and a few re-boots of the Deva 5 it became apparent that it was not going to play ball, all of this was going on while we were still shooting, and by now we were at segment 124.

The first chance I had I asked Martin my Boom-Op to go to the van and get the LG External Firewire DVD Ram Burner, and at an appropriate moment I re-booted to the External LG DVD Ram Burner, It duly mounted and I formatted a new disk, Phew !! at this point I decided to Re-Burn all segments thus far just in case there was an issue with what had already been burned.

On this occasion rushes were to be collected on wrap and driven to London for the first available bath at ILAB in Soho where, once digitised and synced, they were to be taken on the first available flight to New York to facilitate Editing to start Friday morning in New York.

By now it is about 20.00 hrs and I have just finished burning DVD Ram 1, which I chose to Mirror from 1 to 99, obviously by now in an attempt to catch up my hand was forced to select Continuous Mirror, other wise we would have been waiting a very very long time after the anticipated wrap at 22.00, the other reason was that I required mains power for the LG Drive and we had to take power from the Sparks Generator for that, once the Sparks pulled the plug on wrap my burning days were over, by now though I was on DVD Ram 2 and was thankfully starting to catch up.

Now because of all this London/New York thing I paid particular attention to the % mirror display making sure that all was completed and present, fearful of that phone call from post.

By this time I am performing the role of a DATA TECHNICIAN and on occasions was missing mixing cues and missing information regarding said cues and Script versions, furthermore and more worrying I had 2 complete freezes, I was staring at the percentage bar, and glanced over to the Audio Level meters and Hey Ho they were Frozen, with Audio still coming through my headphones, my only Option was to switch off the Deva as I was out of sight of the Director and calling cut was not an option for me, this brought things to a halt and allowed me to Re-Boot.

When the last set up was called which was MOS, DVD Ram 2 was Mirroring Segment 160 of 162, Phew !!!! Made it...., That's a Wrap.

So.......

The Phone Rings early Friday Morning, it is the Production Company in London, to say that a few of the Sound Files were missing, and could I eMail or send Slates 23 to 31, my Heart misses a beat and I tell them I will call back in 10 Minutes, I check my Deva for the files, all is well they are all present, but to my surprise it is everything from Segment 108 to 162, one third of the material totaling 2.1 GB, I then called the Lab in London and they confirmed they could not access Segment 108 Onwards on Disk 2

So how to get 2.1GB to New York quickly, after a brief flutter with my Mac iDisk Public Folder it became apparent that the bandwidth Apple allocate to iDisk was way too slow, it was estimating 15 Hours for the 2.1 GB, I decided to contact a Sound Post House in Glasgow called Savalas and ask their advice

http://www.savalas.co.uk/

I spoke to Kahl Henderson and explained my predicament, he suggested we use their DigiDelivery Account,

http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?langid=100&navid=38&itemid=4782&action=news_details,

I promptly mirrored the missing segments to a Firewire drive and headed down to Savalas, where Kahl duly split the Data into 4 Half Gig Chunks for convenience and eMailed the Editors in New York the details of how to access them vie DigiDelivery Client Software

As another back up I also sent the files via " You Send It " which took a long time to upload (about 8 Hours), and presumably would have taken a similar time to download.

I have just had an eMail from the editor in New York to say that they have successfully downloaded the missing files... Via DigiDelivery and that all was well....

Another very big Phew..........

I hope that none you do not have to go through any of this, but thought that an explanation of my experiences over the last 2 days might be of interest to some.

Kindest Regards

Brian

[Guest BobD]

I would only suggest to always have your own Generator,  a Honda 1000 seems to work great......  They are small and you will never be without power.... I use mine ALL the time... GREAT investment!!

  Not being a DEVA user, I can't help with any of that.....  Sorry....

  Glad you worked it out though...

[Philip Perkins]

I love digital.

So you know--the YOUSENDIT download is generally MUCH faster than the upload on most DSL setups.

I feel your pain--I actually love everything about digital EXCEPT the disk burning thing, and that's enough to drive me nuts.  I avoid disks whenever I can now--offload to a production computer, to a portable HD, but for film telecine DVDs still seem unavoidable.  It would be very cool if we could dump to CF cards--faster, smaller, more reliable than DVDs; but around here the DVDRAM thing still takes lots of phone calls and hand-holding (telecine house suggested to the producer that we record to DAT.  I suggested they jump in the lake.)

Philip Perkins

[studiomprd]

I read the "mirroring story";

my conclusion: that's why we get the big bucks!

[RPSharman]

It is indeed why we are paid as professionals (usually).  I have had this conversation with many producer friends.  When things go right, then almost anyone could do the jobs for which we are hired.  What we are paid for is our knowledge and experience to handle things when they don't go right.

Glad it all worked out.

[Guest Ken Mantlo]

It is indeed why we are paid as professionals (usually).  I have had this conversation with many producer friends.  When things go right, then almost anyone could do the jobs for which we are hired.  What we are paid for is our knowledge and experience to handle things when they don't go right.

Glad it all worked out.

Good point.