You think I'm smart???
Smart A**e maybe!!!

Bob.

My MiniDisc recorder is always in my dufflebag whenever i record anywhere and it's always got a parallel feed from the mixer. It records for 18 hours on a single AA battery (well, as long as i keep feeding it blank discs). If my rig loses power, well, i'm not recording anymore, but at least what has happened so far is safe on that disc.

For some small shows i've carried along a small UPS with me. It has enough juice to keep my mixer and notebook PC running for 15 minutes. May not seem like much, but its more than enough to find where the extension cord got pulled out or the breaker that tripped. And if the venue's power is off longer than that, the show is probably declared over by then anyway.

Also, my standard procedure as soon as the event or even half is over is to immediately copy the file to another hard drive. That's saved my butt more times than i care to admit.

Would i go back to tape? Not on your life. Computer based recording is just way too much better all around when it works, and it almost always works. Actually, now that i think of it, i've probably had tape failures more often than hard drive failures.

Here's an anecdote on power failures.

Several years ago I was working on an SRL show (See this link) as a camera operator guardian. My job was to keep a steadycam operator from walking into flames or threshing machines.

I good and longtime friend was handling the lights for the show and we had a nice big 1000 amp generator for the show powering lights, audio, computers, and a couple of the mostrous machines.

Unfortunately, one of the monstrous machines was a big bank of capacitors with two contact points sticking out the front, and a cable out the back running to one of the distro boxes. It was on wheels and under it's own power, and an operator with a remote could steer it out onto the playing field.

Maybe you can see where this is going, but the tech crew wasn't told about this robotic performer ahead of time. Evidently its job was to trundle it's way out there and nuzzle up to a giant cornucopia of old fish and vegetable matter, all held together in a structure made of chickenwire. Once the contacts got into the chickenwire I assume it the whole thing was expected to discharge and light up the cornucopia.

Well, it didn't work out that way. Yeah, the thing discharged, but it was connected to the genny, which actually jumped from the sudden load (These are similar in size to a small horse trailer, but heavier.) Then one leg of the distro system went dead, followed by all the lights on the other leg going blue for a second before burning out.

Luckily, we had plenty of stuff burning so there was still enough light for the crowd of a couple thousand spectators to disperse. Un-luckily, most of the electronics we were using were fried.

Thereafter, the tech side of these shows always got it's own generator.

So, yeah, I guess you nebver know what's going to happen with your power.

Rob Mack

Farss, just out of curiosity, Is the data no longer on their because after it was written to the disk the power was lost? or is it that for some reason it can't be read? I don't know how the independant HDD's work, but I'd bet that the information is there, and just not flagged as readable or some such nonsense.

Just a thought

Dave

I'm certain the data IS there, I mean it's around a 1GB of it (90 minutes of 24/48K). Plug the unit into a PC via USB and Windows sees the file with the correct date and time stamp on it.
Only problemo is Windows says it's 0 bytes.
I think I'll try what Edirol's tech support suggested, CHKDSK.
The project is not totally dead in the water, I've got audio from the camera to fall back on but it's not going to be stellar and the mix from the desk sounded very clean, everything / everyone was close miced (kind of hard to see the talent in the ocean of mics).

Bob.

File wasn't closed.
Take drive to a recovery specialist.
You'll also lose whatever was in the HD cache, unless you previously set up your HD to use "Write Thru" cache. Technically Write Through is slower, but this example is exactly why you select it.

Oh, wait a minute, this is on the Edirol... Lesson #2: For all equipment we've switched to 100%battery power, or run equipment through mini-ups devices when plugged to mains power.

Still, we lost 6 hours of sound when we discovered the phantom was 48vt but not sufficient wattage to properly power the mic. Hey, all the bars and meters were happy, but the A/D converter kept dropping a bit here and there. We got 6 hours of very well-recorded white noise. Not the fault of the venue, and we could recover the data by slipping bits back in here and there, but the quality was worse than paper cups and string. On-camera sound is useful only as a guide track. We're just going to have to ADR as well as re-shoot. Did we test the equipment before we shot? You bet. Listened to the files and everything. It all boiled down to the manufacturer over-specing his product, and one of our batteries not being fully charged, coupled with a loooooonnnng day of shooting, touched up with over-confidence that the equipment and setup (which never failed us before) would perform flawlessly.

And doncha just hate it when somebody else decides it's time to close up your gig? A few months ago we were looking for our "sound truck" (a borrowed pickup - we didn't have much gear for this shoot) and it was *missing*. Search the grounds and we found the local maintenance guys decided to sub-borrow it to haul all the folding tables - closing down the venue 1hour before schedule because it was Sunday and dang but they wanted to get home early.

Guess where all our sound boxes were? There were a lot of tables to remove to recover them.

We never did get back some 100ft 20amp extension cords from the tent removal folks, who rushed to take down the tents before we could retrieve our sound truck.

As I keep telling everybody, "Hey, we're making movies. If it can go wrong it will. Murphy is one of the Executive Producers, and we can't fire the EPs."

Ready when you are, C.B.