RIP Sound Project :(
I want to start this post by sincerely THANKING everyone that allowed me to inconvenience them by recording their bikes for my sound project video...The Sound of Speed. I can't thank you all enough for giving me your time and allowing me to shoot footage for this project. I had around 20 of the 30 bikes I wanted; it was almost complete.
That being said...I lost it all. The hard drive that I was storing all the footage on died on me. This was only a 3 year old hard drive, but it suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure. It turns out this particular hard drive model is defective, with a 40%+ failure rate, which is crazy high for a hard drive. I will never buy Seagate again...
Along with literally ALL the footage I had for the project, the drive contained my wedding photos and videos and countless other irreplaceable artifacts. Luckily I have the real important stuff like the wedding photos backed up, but I didn't have any of the project's video footage backed up. It was about 2 TERABYTES of data, so I really didn't have any way to back it up. This WAS my backup drive. In hindsight I should've had an external backup drive...but it's a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
I sent the drive into Drive Savers Data Recovery here in California. They're one of the best data recovery places in the world. Since the drive was 3 terabytes total in size, it was going to cost $1500-2000 to have it recovered. The wife and I decided to go ahead and try to have them recover it, as there were videos from our first Hawaii trip and some wedding videos that weren't backed up, among other things. This is a place with a clean room and lab technicians...and their initial estimates looked good for the chances of recovery. Unfortunately, I got a call from them today and they told me it is unrecoverable. They even went as far as taking the platters out of the drive and trying to graft them into another identical drive...but it just can't be done. If this place couldn't do it, it's gone. They didn't charge me a dime for all of this-that's their policy if they can't recover anything. They're a great company and I highly recommend them if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.
Needless to say, I'm heartbroken about this. The drive went out several months ago, which is why I've been quiet about the project for a while. I was hoping I would be able to recover it. I even rode all the way to Sacramento in 100+ degree weather just to record a bike up there!
I would like to think I'll redo the project some day, but I just don't think I have it in me to go through all of that again. I had been gathering footage for 2 years.
With that said, I leave you with this. It's literally all I have left of the project. This is a private YouTube video, so the only way to view it is through this link. Please keep in mind that this was a ROUGH draft I made after I had recorded 6 or 7 bikes just as a proof of concept. The audio is not mastered (you'll hear varying volumes on the bikes) and the camera shots are unpolished (just wanted to see what looked good and what didn't). I figured sharing this is better than sharing nothing at all. Let me know what you think of the footage, at least in as rough of form as it is below. That being said-make sure to watch in HD on a good sound system, as these bikes still sound pretty damn good!
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You can always make new bike videos. Was looking forward to see your finished video. The draft was great though!
Re: RIP Sound Project :(
Originally Posted by LawrenceFromTorance
