Ouch

We have been very lucky on this production. On the technical side we have tried our best to anticipate problems and filming went very smoothly, all things considered. We had redundant video and audio recording, all the footage is double-archived. In post we have been backing up all of our files.

On Friday 7/26 we had our first major ****-up.

The edit has been proceeding nicely. By Friday at lunch there was only about fifteen scenes left to rough out for the first assemble edit. It had taken about two months to get to that point, and even though it was the first pass at the edit, there were a lot of moments and jokes that were working nicely. I was happy with it, and we were just days away from finishing.

And then the edit file crashed, and it couldn’t be opened. No problem – the program auto saves a backup. Except it seems that it crashed while saving the backup, so neither file nor backup will open. No problem, the system backups everything. On Thursday I had checked to make sure the system backups were working. And they were.

Except there was one file that was missed in the system backups. Only one file wasn’t backed up, and it was the file that crashed. And this one file is the single file that links every edit to it’s clip. We have tried everything, and the file is broken and can not be fixed, and a copy can not be recovered.

Our entire edit is gone and we need to start from scratch. It was so close to being done, and it’s gone. We haven’t lost any footage.

We are going to burn the midnight oil, but we don’t want to rush the edit. The backups are working so this can’t happen again, but it will take about a month to rebuild the edit.

As soon as the edit is finished stay tuned for the first trailer!