Alert: Counterfeit SDHC Cards

Until recently, I could roughly classify the bad movies into two categories:
Those that are corrupted during recording due to lack of “happy ending” of the process: Recording failures
Those that are damaged in a storage failure.

But now I will have to add a third category: counterfeit cards.
There is strong evidence that counterfeit cards are spreading like plague since second half of 2009. Usually sold through Internet, shipped from Asia and significantly cheaper than equivalent cards in retail stores.

You won’t notice until it’s too late

Unfortunately, you won’t notice it until it’s too late: the card works fine, then fails silently. One day, you will want to copy or watch the movies and you discover that the majority of them are unplayable.

Treasured, the diagnostic app for damaged movie files, will give some hope: Unplayable files indeed contains some video, and you can see the preview. But you will also notice that all the unplayable files seem to contain the same few seconds of video. This is the symptom of a counterfeit card.

Here is why:
The 16 or 32GB card that you have purchased on this obscure website is in reality a 2GB card. It masquerades its capacity to look and feel like a 32GB file, and at the beginning, while you are filling the first 2GB with data, everything is fine.
But once you go over the real capacity, any data that you write to the card is lost. The card doesn’t complain, the operating system doesn’t notice. Everything seems to work, but in reality your movies and photos are never written to the card. Because it’s already full!

Needless to say, such unplayable movies can’t be restored. It’s possible to repair the content of the card, but not what was not written in the first place.

Please take a look at those web pages to learn more:
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/
http://www.overclockers.com.au/wiki/Fake_Memory_Cards

and to this utility to verify your card:
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/h2testw-14-gold-standard-in-detecting-usb-counterfeit-drives/

Is the Internet shrinking now? (part II)

With the HTML 5 / CSS / Javascript trinity the web was quickly becoming the leading computing platform, a place where products and services could be distributed world-wide. Also a publishing platform for the masses. No longer true.

The website had been the atom the the Internet for a decade: You would shop on Amazon, find flights on an airline website, sell on eBay, look for a job on Monster.

Now for many people the Web is Facebook. This where the services are, where their people are hanging around, where their leisure time is spent. This recent article, Facebook wants to be our One True Login, and the habit of using Google Search as a replacement of the URL bar, show that most people don’t get how the Internet works.

Where do you want to live?

And the success of platforms like Facebook is not surprising: it’s a place where people doesn’t feel confused, a curated, safe environment where they can do their stuff. Without messing with URLs, multiple logins and the dangers of the wild Internet.

And developers follow users, because users is where the money is or will be. This leads to a fragmentation, happening now under our eyes.
If you are a start-up or a software developer starting a project, one of the strategic decisions is: On what platform?
A few years back, the answer was evident: Web.
But powerful platforms have emerged: Apple’s iTunes / App Store and Facebook are the most impressive examples. Palm purchase by HP may end up creating a third powerful alternative.

Platforms?

Those platforms bring customers by the millions, take care of the most annoying aspects of web services, like login, marketing, payments, among others. Why would then developers want to open their web shop “in the wild” and fight for visibility, customers, and reputation, if they can have a comfy land inside the walled domain of their Lord?

Therefore, the Internet is now shrinking, not in size, in number of users, but in ambition.
Ambition is heading down for two reasons:
Innovation is more likely to happen in the wild than in walled domains with strict rules to respect. And if those new platforms are draining a big amount of the innovation power, there is less for the Web.

Why does it matter?

For developers, because they are in front of an ineludible strategy decision: What platforms for my products?
For users, because they are giving away their personal information, consuming habits, payment information, time and money to a single vendor.
And bet all your assets on a single vendor is risky.

This is why the Web should ultimately win, because nobody controls it, because it’s multi-vendor by essence, and because you are not tied to a single vendor that ends up controlling you.

Is the Internet shrinking now?

For about one year I feel an “unbalance in the force”. The feeling that a big, long-lasting change has happened, that we have changed cycle:
The Internet is now shrinking. Not in size, in number of users, but in ambition.

The last cycle embraces roughly the last 15 years, and it’s been an amazing journey:
I remember back in 1994, sitting in my university dorm room (or what it my neighbor’s room? I don’t remember owning a PC at that time) and trying the new stuff: Linux with X-windows and a little program called Mosaic to see graphical pages on the “World Wide Web”. Or was it running Windows 95 beta with Netscape 2 ? Or maybe both, I’m not sure.

There were actually very few sites to visit. I remember being told by a friend (there was no portal, no search at that time…) to go to the Louvre website, one of the few to have high-quality pictures. It was amazing.

Porn sites didn’t exist either. To get hot stuff, you had to download text files from Usenet and build images out of them with complex tools like uudecode.

As incredible as it may seem today, you couldn’t search either. Just look at the web archive and you will see that Google did not exist until late 1998.

You couldn’t find stuff. No music. Computers at that time were not powerful enough to decode mp3 music, and did not have enough storage anyway!

So the web at that time was very small, and had very little “functionality” or use for day to day activities.

Fast forward to 2005.
Web 2.0 is all the rage. The Internet has become a marketplace, an application platform, people starts blogging en masse. Wikipedia shows that collaborative efforts can.
Maybe circa 2006-2007 we have witnessed the high-water of the web, ambition-wise.

We never have been so close the see the vision of the 21th century web fulfilled: an universal, open, ubiquitous software and services platform.
Despite impressive efforts, like HTML5 standard, Webkit, Cappuccino, and the demise of poisons like Flash or Internet Explorer 6, the web is under new threats.

Next post will explain why the Internet is shrinking in ambition, and why it matters.

From I to We

There has been a revolution in Aero Quartet.
After 4 years of loneliness, I can now talk about Aero Quartet crew as we: I have just hired Nieves. She is in charge of movie repair operations.

For a one-man-business that has grown slowly over the years, adding a second person comes as a shock: you discover that you have no processes in place, no office hours, no office space, no collaboration tools.
Suddenly, you have new legal liabilities. Worse, your business apps do not “support” the new split-up of tasks, you have to modify them. And having to share the information is a new habit to learn.

Therefore, one should consider hiring the first employee as an important business change, that must be carefully prepared and implemented. The benefits will come down the road, but during a few weeks, be prepared for your daily dose of frustration:

• your business will never be the same again. It’s no longer your “baby”.
• things you were doing routinely will require training. The “rookie” will not have your productivity, at least not in the first weeks.
• paperwork and set-up (see below) will consume a lot of time.

Hiring is really a daunting task here in Europe. Governments say they do their best to ease economic reactivation, with incentives and the like. But honestly, that’s bullshit. We are still in an over-regulated mess. Twentieth century stuff with applications threefold, and don’t forget the company stamp in the corner or we reject it, mandatory yearly office inspections, …

I had to do a ton of paperwork. None of it for free. Set-up costs are important, in particular when you hire the first person. It can work for middle and big organizations, where one-time costs are diluted. But very small operations suffer the full weight (money and time) of this bureaucracy. Not surprising that we have 20% unemployment rate in Spain, if hiring your co-worker is so difficult.

Despite all this, hiring is a turning point for Aero Quartet:
We believe that the movie repair business can scale, and we are taking the first actions to make it happen!

Treasured 2.0 is here!

Several months of work condensed into a 3 MB zip file.
Includes a 90 pages Movie Repair Guide.
Now you have no excuse: If you don’t repair your damaged video files, it’s because you don’t want to.

SimpleMovieX and the iPad

First, a comment about my predictions: I got them plain wrong.
As many other commentators, I have overestimated the weight of the Technical in innovation: Setting aside the A4 processor, a true technical barrier of entry for competitors, the iPad is first and foremost a device that stands on the shoulders of a Giant: the iPhone.

Here I consider the whole iPhone ecosystem as the sum of the “Touch” user interface and the AppStore and its 140,000 existing applications. For developers, it’s indeed the same platform.

The iPad re-purposes the iPhone ecosystem into the future mainstream utility to get things done. The magic is in simplifying things to make them iPhone-like, and the genius is in artificially restraining some technical capabilities.

Your mythical grand-ma cannot buy or use a computer alone, but she downloads and uses apps on her iPhone, alone. That’s the whole differentiating point of the iPad, and because it’s not a computer, Apple has met its goal to give whole new demographics their Internet-age appliance.

Now, let’s go back to SimpleMovieX. I have no doubt that the iPad will be a successful platform, that eventually will displace current platforms. That is definitively a place I will be unless I want my business to address only niche technical markets ten years from now.

SimpleMovieX is a lightweight video editor. From the scope point-of-view, it can be a good fit for the iPad, that is primarily a consumption and lightweight creative device. SimpleMovieX uncluttered user interface could easily be transposed to iPad screens.

The first problem is how you get your data into your iPad. Movies syncing through iTunes works well, but it is not the channel that people will use to import content that they want to modify. According to published information, the iPad doesn’t have a built-in camera, nor does it connect directly to video cameras.
The iPad seems too disconnected from video production workflows and from video devices to be a place for SimpleMovieX to live. At least today.

From the technical stand point, it looks really bad too: All indicates that the QuickTime framework that powers SimpleMovieX is not available on the iPad. Instead, the modern and efficient QuickTime X, used in the iPhone and iPad for audio and video playback, supports very few codecs and formats, and have near-zero editing capabilities.
This will improve over time, for sure, but Apple is like a car with no reverse gear: QuickTime X will grow towards the future, not towards ensuring full backwards compability with legacy QuickTime.

In other words, if SimpleMovieX someday exists on the iPad platform, it will have nothing in common with today’s SimpleMovieX. Except maybe the skin and purpose. Time will tell.

The Everest of movie repairs

From time to time, I receive an Everest-class repair.
Mount Everest, the highest summit on earth, can barely be climbed by men. Only an elite of alpinists can reach the 8848m without help of oxigen.
In some way, it is measuring the capacity of humans. A bit higher and it would be physiologically impossible to climb.

Similarly, every two or three months, I receive a movie repair that is at the edge of impossible. It has this rare quality of being too damaged to be repaired with known techniques, but at the same time I foresee that there is a small chance that a new technique may fix it.

Officialy, I don’t call it Everest-class, but rather Investigative Repair, to convey to the customer three important ideas:
– I have to develop something radically new. A unique solution for a unique case.
– it’s gonna be expensive (I charge usually one order of magnitude more for those repairs)
– at the end, I can come to the conclusion that the repair is impossible. Results are not guaranteed.

I do such repairs primarly to challenge my repair ability and to push the enveloppe of the discipline. As boring as repairing movies may seem, an Everest-class repair is when there’s adventure, struggle and achievement.

The last Everest-class repair came last month: Canon EOS 5D Mark II files with some bitstream corruption. Mr Szot, the polish director, did not notice the problem until the production was finished. The clips, needed for a 15 minutes short movie called “An Exclusive”, could not be shot again.

I observed around fifty defects in a dozen of files. The footage is encoded in H264, where one wrong bit can propagate nefarious effects over a dozen of frames. Even with “creative editing”, it would be impossible to tell the story: For some important takes, the footage was unusable.

In 99% of the repairs, the problem consists in re-indexing the clip: Audio and Video media is fine but the “table of contents” that tells where the data for each frame, is missing.
But here, it’s the opposite. The table of contents is fine, but the media is corrupt.

Not that corrupt, according to real world standards, since the amount of bad data is only 1 for 100 millions. Like a rare disease that would affect just 70 people in the world population. The typical needle-in-a-hay-stack problem. Change needle for bits and haystack for a file with one billion bits and you get the idea.

Bits Flipping Party

The repair technique lies on a simple idea: when decoding the frame, the wrong bit will cause errors and exceptions that eventually stop the decoding process. That is what we observe in a defective frame: the top is ok, then something occurs, then the rest of the frame is not decoded.
The location where it stops should be close to the wrong bit. Never before, at a short distance after.
From here, we will go backward and flip the bits one by one, until we get something that decodes without error.

I made a bold assumption here: that wrong bits are extremely rare. So rare that we can consider that there is only one wrong bit involved in every decoding error.
I had nothing to really back this assumption: If it’s true, we would be able to repair. If it’s wrong, it would be impossible. Checking the assumption thus became a priority before engaging into time consuming developments.

There’s a second assumption: The distance between the wrong bit and the error is small.
One iteration will be needed for every bit, and iterations are slow since they decode several video frames each. Not just one frame, but the whole group from the I keyframe to the damaged frame. That can take several seconds, so if we have thousands of iterations, it would become impracticable.

Prototype and Automation

I assembled a prototype from various pieces, an open-source H264 decoder, a couple of small programs to flip bits and to detect errors and generate pictures from potentially successful iterations.
I tried it on a first defect, a slow process since almost everything had to be done by hand, and results have to be carefully interpreted.
When I finally managed to get a good picture out of the prototype, it was unbelievable. I had found the needle.

Since I had almost fifty defects to fix, I spent some time automating the process. At the end, I would only have to send a few command-line commands, choose manually the starting point of the search, and launch it.
The computer would run for minutes, sometimes hours, until it starts spitting pictures.
I had to review the pictures one by one, until I could find one that was perfect.
Then, I would modify by the wrong bit in the movie and verify that it fixed the frame and also the rest of frames in the “Group of Pictures”.

In some cases, fixing a frame would just unveil a defective one a few frames later. Just as one train may hide another…

Finally, I managed to clean completely all but one defect. This was quite a surprise. I would never have anticipated such a desperate repair attempt to work with a 98% success rate.

My customer, Mr Szot, is happy. His film “An Exclusive” will be presented this week to the polish public.

A force-sensitive back-side interface for the Tablet?

Yesterday’s post was the fruit of trying to imagine how a tablet could work, from the bare usability standpoint, and I came to the conclusion that the device would be operated from the back side with a “touch sensitive” surface where your fingers would play.

Today, by doing casual research on “back side touch” keywords, I found a very interesting 2007 patent filing by Apple:
Back-Side Interface for Hand-Held Devices

The patent is credited to Apple engineer John Elias. This guy is the founder of Fingerworks.com, a company dedicated to develop devices than can be controlled by gestures. Apple hired him 5 years ago, and surprise! the website has been shut down this week…

Timing is perfect for a 27 January presentation.
I don’t intend to convert this blog into a rumors place, but God! speculation is exciting!

My Tablet

With 2 weeks missing for Apple Tablet presentation, speculation is ramping up.
As smart commentators point out, there is a major problem with such a device:
How would you use it, from bare usability stand point?

Either it’s on resting on a flat surface, and you have unacceptable ergonomics, with your hands hiding the screen and your neck bent at an angle that your EHS department won’t permit.
Or you’re holding it in your hands on front of you. But how do you use the touch screen if your fingers are behind the tablet?

Apple will for sure come with the solution, that will feel so natural and simple that all speculations like mine will look a bit stupid two week from now.

My take on the Tablet:
Why not make the back side of the tablet a touch sensitive surface and show the fingers as an overlay of the user interface?

Fingers that are merely resting on the surface would show a small, transparent “finger print” while the active finger would be more visible, for example with a black circle representing the pressure applied.
This would enable multi finger gestures, and give natural feedback, both visual and tactile.

Such a device with a screen on the front side and a tactile surface on the back side would work well in the two natural positions:
– Held with both hands, mid-air
– Held with both hands, but with hands resting on a table. This one provides a nice 45 degrees angle, and it’s comfortable for long sessions (like watching a movie).

I am not excluding that the screen would also be tactile.

What about the keyboard?
It’s hard to imagine interacting with a software keyboard operated from behind the screen, but why not? With the appropriate visual feedback, it seems plausible.

Such a device layout has another advantage: the touch surface doesn’t need to be exactly as big as the screen, it can be dimensioned to work well with standard hands size.

If ever it comes true, remember that you’ve read it here first!

RIP CubeMovie

Today I have decided to pull the plug from CubeMovie HD, the small “rotating-cube” slideshow application that debuted in 2004.
On Snow Leopard, CubeMovie is completely broken and fixing it would require a complete overhaul, maybe even a rewrite.

Customers that have purchased the program in the last 6 months (June 1st onwards) are entitled to get a refund. Just email to supportcw@mac.com asking for it.

As the father of the creature, let me do the obituary:
CubeMovie is my first relevant program. With over 400 copies sold and $5000 in sales, I cannot call it a success but it still in the median of what a piece of shareware sells. (Fortunately, my more recent products were designed with more ambition and experience, and are doing better…)

CubeMovie is the first program I ever sold. This encouraged me to continue and write more programs. SimpleMovieX was born six months after CubeMovie, and showed enough potential to grow a business upon: I remember paying a fairly expensive PowerBook G4 in 2004 with CubeMovie and SimpleMovieX sales.

Finally, what sets CubeMovie apart is a little known fact: Under the hood, CubeMovie is a ClockWorks application. The whole program is made of around 400 interconnected “vignettes”, that define the flow of events. CubeMovie was first and foremost written as a “demo” of ClockWorks, a programming environment. But ClockWorks was a failure and CubeMovie was the unexpected debris of the shipwreck.

The picture below is the code that manages the texturing of the 6 faces of the cube: from top to bottom, the 6 picture views of the User Interface that link to 6 parameters objects that link to 6 OpenGL display lists.

The whole source of CubeMovie can be seen here (it’s a pre 1.0 version, the final 4.0.2 version graph was far more complex with over 400 vignettes, but I don’t have a picture in my archives, sorry).

Recover videos in damaged disks and cards

For Mac users, I have already covered this topic a few months ago, but now I have a better tool in development that will be ready before Xmas. I will unveil it very soon.

For Windows users, I have recently found a good technique to create a disk image from the damaged disk or card, which is the first step towards recovery of footage.
Note that this can also be useful to Mac users if the disk is not visible in the Finder, but is visible on a Windows PC.

In a nutshell, we use a small utility called dd for Windows that is able to read the raw data of a disk. (From now on, I will just use the word disk, and it can refer to a hard disk, a memory card or a USB drive)

Under the premise that the disk is readable, ie Windows detects it when you plug the disk or insert the card in the reader, “dd for Windows” should be able to create a file with about the size of the disk.

Here is the process, step by step:

http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip

This program is free and distributed under GPL license. For more information, refer to the product page.

dd --list

And you will get a list of the devices connected to your computer.
Here is what I get for example:

rawwrite dd for windows version 0.5.
Written by John Newbigin
This program is covered by the GPL. See copying.txt for details
Win32 Available Volume Information
\\.\Volume{aef46cf9-3e3d-11de-b8c6-806d6172696f}\
link to \\?\Device\HarddiskVolume3
fixed media
Mounted on \\.\c:

\\.\Volume{aef46cf8-3e3d-11de-b8c6-806d6172696f}\
link to \\?\Device\CdRom0
CD-ROM
Mounted on \\.\d:

\\.\Volume{6f41f4b2-d11a-11de-b318-001d4f88486c}\
link to \\?\Device\Harddisk1\DP(1)0-0+5
removeable media
Mounted on \\.\f:

Don’t be afraid, it’s just a list of the devices connected to your computer.
Here the interesting device is the F:\ volume described as removeable media: this is the card that I want to recover. Take note of the corresponding volume name:
\\.\Volume{6f41f4b2-d11a-11de-b318-001d4f88486c}

This volume name starting with \\.\Volume{ and ending with } will be used in step #6.

dd if=\\.\Volume{6f41f4b2-d11a-11de-b318-001d4f88486c} of=c:\usb.img bs=1M

This command creates a file called c:\usb.img that is a carbon-copy of the damaged disk.
The operation can take a long time. For 1GB, it can take one minute or more. For 120GB, it will take several hours.

Note that you can monitor the size of the c:\usb.img file as it grows from 0 to the size of the disk: It will give you an idea of the progress.

What do I do with the .img file?
Now if everything went fine, you should have a .img with a size similar to the disk capacity.
If the disk still contains footage, the footage must now be inside this file also, and we can do a diagnostic of the file and hopefully, repair it.

For Mac users, Diagnostic and Repair have already been covered in a previous post.
For Windows users, the .img file can now be used to create an extract that will be uploaded to Aero Quartet. This is explained in the Movie Repair Guide in the Windows page.

SimpleMovieX and Snow Leopard (update)

Update 9 October: SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 is out!

Version 3.9.2 that runs on Snow Leopard is just a few hours away!

I will have missed the end-of-month deadline by a couple of days, because I had underestimated the changes that Snow Leopard is bringing. Let’s review the main points:

64 bit:
SimpleMovieX cannot compile in 64 bit because legacy QuickTime APIs are not available (only Cocoa QTKit).
For 64-bit apps using legacy QuickTime, a 32-bit process is automatically generated by the OS. Could be what happens in the next major release of SimpleMovieX.
The bottom line is that SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 will ship as a 32-bit Universal binary. Not a big deal.

Intel versus PowerPC:
Snow Leopard only runs on Intel Macs. Older PowerPC models can still run SimpleMovieX from Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard).
A small problem arises for Snow Leopard users: Some components of SimpleMovieX are still PowerPC binaries, and they will probably not migrate to Intel anytime soon. In Leopard, Rosetta, the PowerPC emulation tool, would transparently take care of this. But Rosetta is not installed by default in Snow Leopard.
Therefore, Snow Leopard users that haven’t installed Rosetta will be invited by SimpleMovieX to do so, otherwise MPEG functionality will not work. I’m referring to MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 here. MPEG4 WILL work.

Supported Operating Systems:
SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 will continue supporting Mac OS X 10.4.11 and higher. There is no intention to drop 10.4 support soon, at least until new major version 4.0 comes out.

Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL:
SimpleMovieX will take advantage of those technologies passively: GCD and OpenCL will not make SimpleMovieX perform better per se, but the OS and QuickTime can be faster and SimpleMovieX will benefit.
SimpleMovieX will require a major rewrite before it can use them directly. I believe that version 4, a paid upgrade due next year, should really take advantage of the new “state of art”.

QuickTime X:
Here Apple has done a good job confusing everybody. QuickTime X refers to a new player/editor application and also to a new framework.
The application is very limited in editing functionality. If you need anything beyond basic trimming, you will need to install QuickTime 7 application or better, use SimpleMovieX.
Framework-wise, Snow Leopard comes by default with both QuickTime X and QuickTime 7.
SimpleMovieX does not take advantage of the new framework, because of very strong limitations as of 10.6 release. QuickTime X is a work in progress that will need, I predict, 5 years or more to supplant good’ol QuickTime 7.
The bottom line for SimpleMovieX users: It is not necessary to install QuickTime 7 app in Snow Leopard (or to have a QTPro key) to make SimpleMovieX work.

Conclusion: SimpleMovieX 3.9.2 will be equivalent to earlier versions in features and performance. Snow Leopard lays the foundation for the next ten years on the Mac platform, but profound changes are needed in SimpleMovieX to take advantage of it. Version 4.0, a major release due next year, will bring the promise of those amazing new technologies.

SimpleMovieX and Snow Leopard

The same day that Snow Leopard became officially available, I have started receiving questions from users about compatibility.

Current version 3.9.1 of SimpleMovieX is not prepared to work with Snow Leopard.

Version 3.9.2, a free upgrade for 3.x users, will surface sometime during September, bringing back compatibility with the latest and greatest, ie Snow Leopard.

Tiger and Leopard will continue being supported, whereas Mac OSX 10.3 Panther is no longer supported, version 3.8.1 being the last release working with Panther.

Snow Leopard brings amazing new technologies that can make SimpleMovieX shine. I can think of Grand Central, Open CL, H264 hardware decoding, and QuickTime X.
But to digest all this, SimpleMovieX will require a major rewrite. I believe that version 4, a paid upgrade due next year, should really take advantage of the new “state of art”.

Stay tuned for more info about the future of SimpleMovieX.

A guided tour to Movie Repair

This 4 minutes video will show you how a corrupt quicktime movie can be repaired in 3 easy steps.
Using Treasured and RepairMovie, of course.

Lost file during QuickTime recording

QuickTime Pro offers a convenient way to record a video or audio file, for example using the built-in camera present in all recent Macs.
But the recording process can fail for a number of reasons, like battery failure or lack of disk space. In most cases, you can recover the movie following a few easy steps:

The first and most important thing is to prevent the file from being deleted by the system. As it’s a temporary file, rebooting the computer could delete the file.

Do not reboot your computer!

We will find the file and move it to a safe place. The location of the file depends on the volume on which you were recording:

In Boot volume:
Boot volume is usually your internal hard disk. It’s the disk that contains the operating system and your home folder.
In this case, the movie file is located in /private/var/folders/

This folder is not visible in the Finder. It’s hidden because you are not supposed to store your data here. But there’s a way to explore this folder anyway:

From the Finder, use menu Go > Go to Folder … and type /private/var/folders/

A Finder window opens, revealing a few subfolders. Now you can search inside, until you find one or several files with extension .mov and whose date of creation matches the QuickTime recording incident.
Just move those files to the Desktop. Once on the Desktop, the files are safe.

In an external drive, or a volume that is not the boot volume:
In this casem the file should be in this folder:
/Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk/.TemporaryItems/folders.501/TemporaryItems/


Note the . before TemporaryItems, it makes the folder invisible in the Finder.
You must use Go > Go to Folder… and type the path like this:
/Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk/.TemporaryItems/

Do not forget to replace nameOfExternalDisk by the real name of the volume!

Then explore the subfolders until you find the .mov files whose creation date correspond to the QuickTime session, and move them to a new folder on the same volume.

Now the files are in a safe place. You can reboot your computer if needed.

As the recording process was interrupted, the files are not playable: QuickTime gives an error message when you try to open them.
Fortunately, there is Treasured, and you can diagnose and preview the file.

5 tricks to pay less for your movie repair

In some cases, it’s possible to pay $89 instead of $149 to have your footage fixed. Discover how…

• Repair less files: Use Treasured to preview your damaged videos. If only one clip is really important to you, and if it’s less than 500MB in size, then it will cost you only $89 (Local Repair)
• Repair smaller files: Only files under 500MB apply for a cheaper Local Repair. If your file is bigger than that, but you are only interested in fixing a segment of the movie, then you can use Treasured to extract the segment, and request a repair only on this segment.

  Utilities > Sample Extraction… in Treasured menu, creates a file called extract in your repair folder. Rename it and run Treasured on it.

• Specify that you want only Audio or only Video: Usually, synchronization of audio and video accounts for a important slice of the final cost. Treasured lets you uncheck audio or video if you feel it’s not necessary.
• Don’t check Absolute Privacy if you don’t need it. Regular level of privacy is good enough for the vast majority of repairs. Absolute Privacy commands an extra cost.
• Be patient… Repair costs will go down as repair techniques improve. Check the repair cost again after 3 months. Maybe it’s significantly lower.
June 26th, 2009 in Movie Repair | Comments Off on 5 tricks to pay less for your movie repair