How to Repair Corrupted Quicktime Files

A few weeks ago I participated in a three-camera shoot of a concert using two 7Ds and a 550D. When I tried to transfer the files to a computer, I was shocked to discover that two of the files were corrupt. Worse still, they happened in the same scene from two different cameras, which also happened to be the most important song of the concert. What horrible luck. I have been shooting with DSLRs for quite some time, and I have never had a corrupt file, much less two on the same night, at the same time, on two different cameras! I immediatly began to research how to fix them, but found the info on the internet to be a bit lacking. I hope this post will give someone with the same problem a slightly easier time. 

Repairing Quicktime files for $
The UI of Treasured by Aero Quartet 
One clue that the data was salvagable was that, even though Quicktime (or any other program for that matter) couldn't open them, the files were of an appropriate size (about 2GB). The first solution I found was a program called Treasured from Aero Quartet. I downloaded it for free, ran it on one of the files and it immediately showed me the recovered frames. It was only then that I realized that you have to pay per file with this solution. I have read online that people have had good results with this program and you only pay if they can fix the file but I thought if Treasured can show me the frames, there must be a way to fix it for free.

Repairing Quicktime files for free
After some time I found two free methods which worked for me. The first is very simple, but only worked for one file. What perplexed me about the corrupt file from my camera (the 550dD) was that I had watched it in the camera the night before. I put the chip back in, and sure enough, the file that would not play in Quicktime played back in the camera perfectly. On both the 7D and the 550D you can trim videos in the camera. I trimmed a frame or two from the heads and tails and chose the option to save a new file. Bingo! The new file played back perfectly in Quicktime. Excited, I put the file from the 7D on to my SD card, but the 550D couldn't read it. I had my friend try the same thing from the original CF in her 7D, but the 7D was unable to read the file as well. Damn. 

The UI of HD Video Repair by Grau GbR

Eventually I found another solution: A free program called HD Video Repair from a company called Grau GbR. The program looks complex, but really is quite simple. You select the file you want to fix and as well as a reference file (which is a non-corrupt quicktime from the same camera).  You then click "Scan" and wait. It is hard to tell that it is doing anything once you click scan, but be patient it is working. The program seems like it was relatively quickly hacked together, so it lacks some polish. Eventually, the filename will appear in the space below the scan button. By default, the repair file will go to a folder called repaired in the same location as the corrupt file. The resulting repaired Quicktime still seemed to have some codec glitches in my case, but converting it to ProRes seem to fix that. The audio was also out of sync, which I imagine is fixable in the advanced settings, but since I am using an external recording anyway, it didn't matter to me. HD Video Repair is Donationware

TL;DR
Repair Corrupt Quicktime Files for Free by: 

Repair Corrupt Quicktime Files at a Price

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Photo Blog Retrospective

My goal when I started my Photo Blog entries back in 2008 was to force myself to publish something creative on a regular basis and help me grow as an artist. I definitely think that it has been a worthy pursuit. Now that I have made 100 Photo Blog entries, I thought it would be interesting to look back at some of them from the past ~2 years.

I have a hard time objectively judging my own work, so instead of making a "best of" I will just pick out a few entries which stand out due to the story behind them, the circumstance, technique, or something else that was notable. (each link opens in a new window)

Photo Blog #15: I was in Gruyeres last weekend.
A photo of the church in Gruyères. Gruyères is a special place to me because that is where I filmed my documentary about H.R. Giger. Anytime I produce a project in a particular place, that place feels like a home to me.

Photo Blog #20: An early morning shot of the Capitol Building on inauguration day.
My wife and I were in Washington D.C. to witness the inauguration of President Obama. It was pretty amazing to be there on that historical day even thought it was freezing out on the Mall at 5 in the morning. 

Photo Blog #36: Bonus Paris Edition
This was one of the multi-picture photoblog which I used to do. I have since decided that one picture at a time is better. I love Paris. It is where my wife and I were engaged over 5 years ago. This is a selection of photos of a trip we took to Paris in 2009

Photo Blog #46: Say a little prayer.
This was one of those perfect moments. I was walking around Zürich with my OG Lensbaby when just as I passed this school tourist group, one of the kids turned his back to the other and began to pray. He seemed to be in his own little world.

Photo Blog #56: Histoire Metallique.
This was shot in the library of Stift Klosterneuburg just outside of Vienna, Austria. I was there helping out my friend Jason film a short documentary which can be seen here. It was quite a unique experience to live in a monastery for a short time.

Photo Blog #71: Grossmünster(s)
I took these photos shortly after I acquired my Polaroid Image System camera. I have since become a big fan of the camera and it has been featured commonly in my photoblog.

Photo Blog #76: der Prime Tower im Bau.
As of July 2010,  the Prime Tower is the tallest building in Switzerland. At 126m it isn't so impressive when compared to most cities, but in Zürich it really stands out. I really like the tower and took this photo on a day went I was planning to photograph it specifically.

Photo Blog #79: She found the time.
This photo was taken during a fashion shoot called "Instant Alchemy" I made for Kimandra. It was a very fun and creative day. 

 


 Photo Blog #94: Coffee girl.
At every coffee shop in Ethiopia, there is a raised platform where a woman prepares coffee in the traditional manner. Coffee is very important in Ethiopian culture. That is probably why I liked the country so much.

Those are just a few of the Photos which had a background story that stood out to me. If anyone is curious about any of my other Photo Blog entries feel free to as on my contact page. 

I'm looking forward to creating my next 100 Photo Blogs.

Canon 550d Movie Crop Mode

The Canon 550d is an excellent photo camera with its 18MP(5176x3456 pixels) sensor, but the main reason that I purchased one was for its HD video modes. It is capable of shooting 1920x1080p at 24, 25 & 30fps as well as 1280x720p at 60 & 50 fps. In order to produce these frame sizes/rates while still using the full sensor area the camera "cheats" by skipping lines. When shooting 1080p for example, i believe that the camera is skipping every third line. The 550d has another video mode which doesn't use this cheat. It is called Movie Crop Mode which is interesting but in most cases not very useful. Check out this diagram:
The part of the image outline in red represents the entire usable pixel area of the 550d. Outlined in green is the 16x9 part of the sensor used in the HD modes with gray lines in half the frame to illustrate showing the line skipping occurs. The little blue box in the middle is the part of the sensor used in Movie Crop mode. The camera is cropping out the standard definition-sized center of the sensor to make videos of 640x480 resolution. This is essentially the same as taking a photo from the camera and cropping it to 640x480, except that it is 30fps video. What does this mean? The most apparent thing you notice when using this mode is whatever lens you have on is effectively 7 times longer. A 50mm lens becomes a 350mm lens. A 200mm becomes a 1400mm. It also means you have some incredible macro capabilities because the minimum focus distance of the lens doesn't change. Finally, it actually has less aliasing artifacts than the HD modes in the camera. As interesting as all of this is, it is not HD so it's actual applications are very limited. Here are some real examples:
 
iPhone/iPad compatible Youtube Link 

A few notes about this video: The camera has a normal 640x480 mode which is not included in the diagram at the top of the article. It works essentially the same as the HD modes by line-skipping. I included two HD clips at 100% to show that the Movie Crop really does resolve more information than the HD mode. The footage of the green bug was taken with an 80mm lens, which really shows off the macro abilities of Movie Crop. The baby foxes were shot at 3200 ISO, it is amazing that one can film in such lighting conditions even if it is grainy.

Movie Crop is a fun feature to have, but the lack of HD makes it mostly useless. It would have been nice for Canon to include a 1080p Movie Crop function which would give non-line-skipped footage with a crop factor. Maybe this is something that will be included in professional Canon HDSLRs in the future.

Questions? Comments? Contact me.

Related Posts
Very Unscientific Canon 550d Tests
Pocket Cam: Scenes from Berlin
Lina Button @ Cafe Henrici
 

Pocket Cam: Scenes from Berlin


I am stretching the definition of "pocket" a bit with this video since it was shot with my 550d. However, the camera is still relatively small and portable. Also, if I have my 550d with me I won't be carrying my Mino or make the choice to film with the iPhone. Pocket Cam is more about capturing the unique scenes as they happen and not the size of the camera.

Related Posts:
Pocket Cam: Scenes from Paris
Pocket Cam: The Music Box
Pocket Cam: The Cowboy and the Bull 

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Very Unscientific Canon 550d Tests

I haven't bought a video camera in a very long time. The main reason for this is that I believe that every camera on the market is either too expensive or has too many drawbacks. However, two weeks ago I bought a Canon 550d which is the first camera that meets my price-perfomance requirements. I was close to buying a Canon 7D a few months ago but decided not to. The camera's shortcomings (line-skipping sensor, h.264 codec) didn't justify the price to me. Shortly after I decided not to get the 7D, Canon announced the 550d (known as the Rebel T2i in the US) which made me incredibly glad I didn't make that purchase.  The video functionality on the 550d is virtually identical to that of the 7D. The only notable differences are the lack of 1/3rd stop ISO settings, white balance fine-tuning in Kelvin, and HD external video output while recoding. The other differences between the cameras are purely build quality and photo shooting speed -- neither which I care about too much. The other big difference: the 550d costs half as much as the 7D.

I haven't had the chance to use the camera on any legitimate projects yet, however I have made some very unscientific tests:
 
Download High-Bitrate 1080p h.264(307MB)

The main purpose of these tests was to investigate overall image quality and to see how the camera looked with varying depth of field. The lighting is clearly not constant at all (I had no real cinema lights handy in my apartment at 1am), but Spock's face should be consistently exposed throughout. All of the tests were shot using a Canon 50mm f1.8, some of the other random footage was shot using a Manual Nikon 24mm f2 or the Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS. I recorded at 1080p 25.

I think the camera performs quite well. The noise (even at ISO 1600). though noticeable, isn't really distracting. One problem I noticed and was expecting is in the last test clip where I rack focus. There is some shimmery aliasing on the card in the background. This must be an artifact of the line-skipping sensor.

Any questions?