Engagement session with Jeremy Lawson, you can see more of the photos on his blog.
150 Hours Lost And The Data Wasn’t Recovered
Last week Maeve and I had a hard drive fail. We haven’t had a drive fail in a long time. Thank goodness for that. These days, most of the time I’m working off my internal hard drive within DropBox. That way if my MacBook pro crashes or get’s stolen, everything is in dropbox and I can be up and running within a few hours on another machine. My projects are relatively small, most of the time taking up no more than 50 gigabytes of space. But the projects that Maeve works on involve a lot of footage and images. This drive that failed was 500 GBs in size and she was using around 400 GBs of data. Now a drive failing sucks but the real kicker was that this drive had a couple videos Maeve had been working on for weeks and they were just about to be wrapped up, all that was needed were the graphics from me. Then out of nowhere, the disk became damaged. Talk about bad timing!
Not having a disk fail in so long we were’t really sure what tools were available to repair it. Of course we ran Disk Utility and that did nothing.
I figured I’d try Tech Tool Pro, I had pretty good luck with that in the past. After letting that run for about 5 or 6 hours I wasn’t sure what it was doing, there is no status within the program. So I bailed on that.
Up next was DiskWarrior, not sure why I didn’t go to that first. DiskWarrior seems to save the day more often then anything else. In many cases, DiskWarrior is able to replace a damaged volume’s problematic directory with the new repaired directory that it creates. However, DiskWarrior reported that it could not. It reported:
DiskWarrior has successfully built a new directory for the disk named “Unknown.” The new directory cannot replace the original directory because of a disk malfunction.
Crap!
But the silver lining here is DiskWarrior lets you make a preview drive that mounts just like any other drive and you can recover some of your files from there. It didn’t recover everything but it did recover some files and that was better then nothing. With that all moved to another drive I figured I’d give one more tool a try.
Data Rescue… Never using this program or knowing how it worked, I gave it a shot. At least the repair / recovery process gave me some sort of a preview for what was happening. Unfortunately it took about 100 hours to complete! If I had known it was going to take that long I would have stopped it a lot sooner. After 15 hours you really just wonder how much longer can this really take? So you keep waiting and waiting…
Data Rescue was able to recover some files, the awful part was it renamed and moved everything around. For instance, it made a quicktime folder and dropped all the quick time movies in there and named them QT00001.mov, QT00002.mov QT00003.mov, etc… Totally un-helpful and a waste of time; especially when you are dealing with hundreds of quick time files.
After around 150 hours of trying to bring this drive back to life we decided to just run with what we could get from the DiskWarrior preview drive. Which turned out to be a lot but not everything. We might have been better off using those 150 hours to just re-do all the work.
With all that being said, make sure you always have back ups!
Growing The Business
It looks like its time I stop flying solo and make the leap to hire someone at LooseKeys. As I’m moving forward with LooseKeys, after just celebrating my one year anniversary, it seems like this is the logical next step if I want to grow. Business has been great and I’m working with some amazing people and businesses. Right now I can only handle so much of the work and although working with freelancers has proven to be wonderful, it is now time to look into bringing someone on that can help with more than just what a freelancer can do. Someone who is there to bounce ideas off of and help take on some of that spillover work that I can’t handle by myself. Hiring someone full-time is no small decision.
I’m now going to take on the responsibility for someone else’s income and future. That’s not something to be taken lightly. Which makes choosing the right person so important. I’m going to be working with them day in and day out and they are going to be helping to build and define LooseKeys. That’s why although I have a style and market that LooseKeys focuses on, I’m going to hire for attitude first rather then skill. Oh they need to be talented, otherwise I’d still be doing all the work like I am now. I believe I need to find the right fit skill wise but most importantly someone I’ll enjoy spending a lot of time with while working hard together. It’s hard to find the right fit when currently it’s just been a two-person team. Although Maeve isn’t full-time yet she is as much a part of LooseKeys as I am. So finding someone that we both feel comfortable working with is important.
It’s been great that I’ve had the chance to work with so many freelancers and that the projects I do lend themselves for this sort of talent. I’m able to work with people and see if they’re a good fit before making that uncertain financial commitment.
No matter who it is that ends up working with LooseKeys, I’m excited for what that new dynamic will bring to the business. I have no doubt that LooseKeys will create even better work when the right people are involved.
Maeve Price’s commute in Alaska. Mush! Mush!
What is Esfeed?
Lucky for you, your days of crazy-clicking just to inform your friends are over. Unless you want your fingers to hurt. Esfeed is a place that lets you share all the good bits to your friends in one go.
For more information, go to esfeed.com or follow Esfeed at Twitter.
Client: Esfeed
Illustration: Brad Chmielewski
Animation: Brad Chmielewski
Audio: Maeve Price
Voice Over: Jeff Conwell
So Long 2010
When looking back on 2010, the best way I can describe it is a crazy roller coaster ride. It had a ton of high points and a few quick low dips but it all seemed to zip by at a lighting fast pace.
This past year started off with Ken Hunnemeder, Maeve Price and I taking a road trip down south for the release of Foothills Sexual Chocolate. It was one of those rare beers along the lines of 3 Floyds Dark Lord and Surly Brewing’s Darkness. Along the way we stopped at over six breweries and recorded each stop for a number of different Hop Cast episodes that got released in the following weeks. When the three of use rolled back into town on Super Bowl Sunday we jumped right into finishing the “Making of The Symposium Ale” video for the 2010 Craft Brewers Conference that was taking place in Chicago. Around the time of Craft Brewers Conference I took some time and finally re-did the Hop Cast opening and graphics for the show. It needed a new look that would be more unique and showcased more of what we did. Sure 2010 wasn’t all about the Hop Cast but creating content every week for the last two years, you find that it really does take up a good portion of your time. Also without the Hop Cast Ken, Maeve and myself would have never been able to meet so many great people, many of them we now call friends.
On the motion graphics side of things (the side that pays the bills) it has been crazy, especially in the explainer video market. For me if 2009 was all about music videos then 2010 was all about explainer videos and I don’t see that changing too much either into the new year. I’ve been inspired by the startup community and I’ve been able to work with some great companies; Groupon, Sprout Social, Wamboo, Watermelon Express, Offermatic, Trial Pay, Buscan2 and Screenr. Some of these videos were created at Daily Planet ltd. and some where done on my own but either way I always tried to add my own spin onto them Both the work I’m doing on my own and the work that is happening at Daily Planet ltd. just continues to get better and better. A big accomplishment of 2010 came from the Money Money Money music video. It’s been played almost 200,000 times on vimeo, it made it onto the main feed of motionographer and got into issue 75 of Stash. All of these are a huge honor! I really never thought I’d see my work in Stash. Getting your work out there and seen by people is a hard thing to do sometimes. A few months ago I spoke at a Women In Film workshop on making connections via social media and that’s something I talk about here often on my site. Besides making connections with social media you need to turn some of those into real life connection and that’s one reason I’ve also been working with Mike Petrik on the Chicago Motion Artists Group. For some reason the community of Chicago motion graphics folks sort of fizzled out in the last few years. Sure there are small pockets here and there and Chicago Final Cut User Group is really large… But Mike and I both wanted a motion graphics focused group where we could gather everyone together and share a few beers. If our last meetup was a sign of what 2011 is going to bring, it’s only going to get better. The last meetup at Rock Bottom we had over 60 people and gave away some great raffle prizes.
On the personal side it’s always nice when you can say the family is on a whole doing very well. Unlike 2008, I didn’t travel anywhere too exotic this year but it was great being able to see so much of the US since it’s so big. I was able to visit Portland, OR three times for a number of different reasons. Two of those times for different friends and families weddings. Speaking of marriage, Maeve Price and I finally set a wedding day and chose a location to celebrate this moment in our life. It was a long time in the works and I’m sure there was a number of people who didn’t think we were ever going to get around to it.
Last year 2009 closed with new ideas, dreams and goals for the future and 2010 isn’t any different. I’ve got some great things planned for the new year including the release of the Invasion Of The B-Movie Posters iPhone application and a few new things that I can’t wait to share. To all the friends new and old and all my family members, thank you for making 2010 a huge success.
