A weekend of love and hate
Saturday: Great!
Sunday: Terrible!
A heartfelt thanks to Jacey, Rachel, and Lisa, who woke up (presumably) early to volunteer their comedic talents to the Wasteland sketches we filmed on Saturday. We were very productive, although at the time our direction probably seemed “loose ‘n diffuse.“ Since Lynne left the show, the two remaining girls in our cast have been doing double the work, and even our dudes are being double- and triple-booked for roles. Happily they’re up to the task. We filmed from 9:30 to 3:30, and it wasn’t until 2:00 that our minds and bodies started to crumble.
Whatever. Four hard weekends of filming, and we’ve got—at a quick glance—around 24 video sketches in various stages of post-production or outright completion. We’re on schedule. We still have too much to do, but each week we chip away a noble amount.
Saturday night I became paranoid about how much precious Wasteland footage I didn’t have duplicate copies of. The raw footage will be on tape for all time, but countless hours have already gone into cutting, splicing, and massaging rough cuts in Premiere. Well, fuck me for trying to do the right thing—I left Norton Systemworks to make a backup copy of my video directory overnight, and when I woke up, my computer was irreparably frozen. After several hours of teeth grinding, praying, cursing, and hot angry tears, I unplugged the drive with the Video, reformatted C:, and installed WinXP fresh.
At some point in the afternoon, Haas came to our apartment to film another sketch. We bagged it, and I think (hope) I acted well—I honestly don’t remember much of the shoot, my mind furiously churning through data recovery options instead of learning my lines. No matter how good the sketch turns out I will inevitably be disappointed with my performance for this very reason, a double-shame since it’s one of the few Wasteland video sketches in which I act.
The filming done, I returned to my sputtering machine. With some BIOS-level tweakage I was able to isolate the corrupted drive in such a way that WinXP doesn’t crash while attempting to detect it in boot. A glimmer of hope? I called TechFusion, a local data recovery service who frequently underwrites on WBUR. I should’ve known that if they can afford to underwrite on WBUR, I can’t afford their services. $90 for diagnosis? An estimated $500-2,500 for recovery? And they market themselves towards students? More like TechFuckYousion. (Burrrn)
I Googled some freeware data recovery applications. All failed, either by locking or causing the BSOD-reboot. Then I tried a demo of this little program which not only revealed to me my directories—pinned beneath layers of corruption—but promised me that the files could be recovered by the full version. $70 < $500; done.
I've been able to retrieve everything from the corrupted drive that is truly irreplaceable: photos and Premiere project files. I also rescued my music collection. However, Premiere project files aren't terribly useful without the raw AVI footage on which they are layered. So far Nucleus's Kernel software has locked each time I tried to recover a larger file, such as the AVIs. I have more digging to do tonight, but it may be that my final two options are:
- Have data recovery specialists retrieve the AVI files and directories, then bend over for payment.
- Re-import all the footage and massage each Premiere file to fit. Since we haven’t been using timecodes, this will be time consuming (but free!).