Archives for category: The Crunch

December 31, 2010. The stroke of midnight.

It’s been a 16-hour shoot, and I’ve just called for wrap. Everyone’s spirits, dampened by six hours of overrun spent shooting products against greenscreen in the studio, are now palpably higher. Bottles of beer, already having mysteriously appeared on the set in the past hour, are passed around as the hot film lights are struck off. It’s been three days of filming, and now that New Year’s Eve is a mere 12 hours away, everyone’s relaxed and upbeat, talking about their plans for the weekend. The grip is grinning from ear to ear. But of course he is; in a few hours’ time, he’ll be on a plane to Phuket.

At the loading/unloading bay we part. There’s no one else around. Home being a mere six stops away, I decide to catch the last bus. Walking in the light drizzle, I clutch the tote bag closer to me. Even in my slightly-buzzed state, I am mindful of its contents: a laptop, a hard disk and numerous memory cards containing three days’ worth of footage. Losing any one of them, at a cost of thousands of dollars per shoot day, would be instant career suicide.

On this shoot, I am also the data wrangler, the guy whose job is to ensure footage is safely transferred from the cameras and filed onto disk. Normally, the footage is transferred immediately once the memory card is filled and ejected from the camera. But it has been a long day. It’s understandable.

In the morning I wake and set about transferring the last of the footage, about 20 gigabytes, on two cards. 16 GBs down, I plug in the second one, a SanDisk Extreme IV 8 GB CompactFlash card, only to see its volume icon appear on the Mac OS X desktop briefly before disappearing just as quickly. My heart skips a beat, because I know exactly what’s going to happen next.

An error box pops up, right on cue: “The disk you inserted was not recognized by this computer. Initialize, ignore, or eject?”

Fuck. My balls hit the floor and roll off under the desk.

For some reason, the volume on the card has not been unmounted cleanly. Maybe it’s a loose USB cable connection. Maybe it’s failing hardware. Who can say for sure? But what I know for sure is this:

A memory card—any storage medium—needs a filesystem in order to have files written onto it. But, before that, a partition has to exist before a filesystem can be created to store files and subsequently accessed by a camera or a computer.

It’s common knowledge that you have to eject or unmount a memory card before you can pull it out of a card reader. When a card is not safely unmounted, when the operating system hasn’t had enough time to cleanly write to the card, resulting in a “dirty write,” it almost always corrupts the filesystem, rendering it in a unreadable state.

But the data is still in there. It’s just that the partition cannot be seen because it is now corrupted; quite simply, the operating system, a visitor in the middle of a street, cannot find the house that is the partition because its address plate is missing. The house and its occupants—the data, your precious data—is still there, plain as day.

Being no stranger to data loss, my instincts kick in, and I click the “Eject” button. Now, if you ever find yourself staring at this very error dialog box, never, NEVER EVER click “Initialize.” If you do, the operating system will format the card, which will stack the odds against you of successfully recovering your data.

I curse in six languages and begin the recovery process with a few recovery applications: Data Rescue II, Drive Genius, SanDisk Recovery Pro. The usual suspects. None works.

The problem is, most recovery applications are designed to recover data that has been accidentally overwritten or deleted from a card, and are clueless when it comes to a card with a corrupted filesystem. If the operating system cannot mount the card and make it available to the user, the user cannot tell the recovery application to recover the card.

Classic LPPL*.

Eight hours go by. Here I am, on New Year’s Eve, faced with the possible loss of four hours’ of footage shot on overtime costs. I do the math and wonder if it’s cheaper to reshoot or to send for data recovery, the cost of which I’m sure will be exorbitant.

Even as I’m ready to throw the towel in, and mentally bracing myself for the inevitable, the geek in me refuses to concede, because I KNOW the damned data is still in there intact. I give Google one last search. One particular listing in the search results reads like my personal 12-step program to data salvation.

TestDisk. Fixes, repairs or rebuilds FAT16, FAT32, HFS+ and NTFS partitions. Runs on DOS, Windows 9x, XP, NT, Vista, FreeBSD, Linux and Mac OS X. Open source software. Free.

I download and fire TestDisk up. It’s old-skool command-line based; Arrow up/down, Enter, “Y”/”N” keys, that sort of thing.

I pop in the corrupted card. It doesn’t mount, of course, but this shows up in TestDisk:

Disk /dev/rdisk0 - 7.6 GB / 7.0756 GiB

It’s The Partition Formerly Known As KNN**.

I give the instructions TestDisk advises a good once-over, select the partition and hit “Repair.”

It must have taken, by my unscientific guesstimate, only all of 15.383 seconds before the beloved “EOS_DIGITAL” volume icon pops up on the OS X desktop. My jaw drops correspondingly as fast.

You’ve never seen me do a CMD+A, CMD+C and CMD+V faster in my life. As I lean back into my chair and exhale, I become aware of the commotion in the living room. Something’s happening on TV.

Oh yeah, Happy New Fucking Year.

* For my non-Chinese friends, LPPL is loosely and politely translated as a Catch-22, a no-win situation. The actual translation has got something to do with testicles…
** … while KNN has something to do with one’s mother.


1,242 meters up somewhere on Bukit Larut in Taiping, shooting video and stills for the EPK (electronic press kit) of a feature film. We’ve been here since April 16, and we have 10 more days to go.

For television commercial shoots, camera equipment is always hired from a rental house. But as a director who would often operate the camera myself, I have a Canon XL-1s Mini DV camcorder, purchased six years ago, that I use extensively for smaller-scale shoots.

A major wave of change swept through the broadcast industry sometime in the second half of those six years. By 2007, High Definition has all but supplanted Standard Definition for broadcast productions. Along with the migration to HD, tapeless acquisition was fast becoming the norm; footage recorded to solid-state memory media as video files ready for editing, eliminating the time-consuming process of digitizing tapes. More and more, I found myself choosing to rent a HD camcorder rather than using my own SD camcorder even for the smaller shoots.

The first sign that my equipment line-up was in dire need of an upgrade was in September 2007, when my workhorse XL-1s finally gasped its last breath halfway through a shoot in Shanghai. I was faced with the unpleasant prospect of investing S$10,000 or so for a HD camcorder, in particular a Sony PMW-EX1.

But making the move to HD meant more than just buying a HD camcorder; the massive amount of HD data meant that I would have to upgrade my entire postproduction workflow. One new workstation here, plenty of high-speed storage there, and I was looking at another S$15,000 easily, a figure I was neither willing nor capable of spending at that point in time.

I held out. In the meanwhile, my stills digital SLR cameras were, likewise, quickly falling into obsolescence. Solid as they were, my two cameras—a Canon EOS 5D and a Canon EOS-1D Mark II—had already been surpassed by newer cameras sporting next-generation features I found increasingly difficult to ignore; features such as 14-bit A/D conversion, larger, higher-resolution and more viewable 3.0″ LCD screens, and Live View had become ubiquitous.

But, again, I held out. So, for a good whole year, there I was, a director in search of a decent broadcast-quality HD video camera, and a photographer in search of a replacement for his two previous-generation digital SLR cameras.

Then the impossible happened. What really convinced me that I could no longer hold back was the one game-changing feature—the second sign—offered by one of those next-generation digital SLR cameras:

Video recording.

Such a development is a watershed moment for someone like myself who has been shooting both videos and stills all his professional life. The significance of a video-recording digital SLR is in the leap in artistic expression I can now have.

These digital SLR cameras, with their large image sensors the same size as that of 35mm film, produce the shallow depth-of-field look synonymous with 35mm motion picture film cameras. Since depth of field increases as focal length decreases, typical camcorders, with their much smaller sensors, simply cannot produce that elusive, shallow DOF look that videographers yearn and go out of their way to achieve (read this article for the physics).

Years ago, to achieve the same look, I had to use a P+S Technik Mini35 lens adapter. It was expensive to rent (S$900/day with accompanying Zeiss Super Speed lenses, or S$12,500 to purchase, camera and lenses not included), and it was bulky; it was actually bigger than the XL-1s camcorder it mounted onto.

Now, the same, if not better, filmic look can be had with a digital SLR camera a third of both the cost and weight of the P+S Technik Mini35. What’s more, since I already own a small collection of quality EF lenses I can use on such a digital SLR camera, I now need to maintain only one camera system, as versus one video camera system and one stills camera system.

Last week, after a series of unfortunate events unfolded on a couple of ongoing jobs—which I took to be the third and final sign from the heavens above it’s time to finally upgrade—I took the plunge and bought an EOS 5D Mark II.

I know, I know… I said I would never get a 5D Mark II because it has the same AF system of the 5D which I find disappointing. In fact, I felt none of the excitement on the day I bought the 5D Mark II that I had felt previously when buying other cameras.

Having used the camera for a week, I still have deep misgivings at just how much better the AF system in the 5D Mark II will perform, as Canon claims it would. Also, I remain unconvinced that the form factor of a digital SLR is at all suitable for video acquisition.

Accustomed to operating 2/3″ Digital Betacam and DVCPRO camcorders, all of which are of the traditional form factor of the broadcast video camera—articulatable viewfinder, zoom grip, top handle, left-handside controls—I find myself constantly trying to press my eye to the viewfinder on the 5D Mark II while the camera is rolling.

Still, I am very heartened by the 35mm look the 5D Mark II achieves. But is The Look worth the various ergonomical and operational shortcomings of this camera? I have a strong suspicion this is going to be a love-hate relationship.

Time will tell.

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Studying the proofs of my first magazine spread, due out in July.

When my personal life is such a mess, it is all the more that I strive for perfection in each and every frame of this make-believe world that I have absolute power over.

With the last bottle of Muji milk tea under my arm, I shuffle down the pitch-black corridor, my head bowed, my eyes watering, and quietly whisper some words of encouragement for myself.

“Someday, this will be all worth it.”

Maybe this is what keeps me going.

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I have never taken it upon myself to canvass for work much, something I really should do because I know the worth of my work. So, with this letter, I hope for new opportunities, sights and rewards in the year ahead…

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