ThEC2018 (Thorium Energy Conference 2018) took place in Brussels Oct 29th-31st.
The conference was great. My video capture was troubled. I'll give you the bad-news first...
I lost hundreds of GB of video capture when I stupidly shut down my MacBook before it was finished writing to the HDD. It was late at night, I'd been waking up every hour to advance video data copying, and I can't remember if I was trying to switch from Windows to MacOS, or MacOS to Windows... but the MacBook keyboard was lit for ~3 minutes after the screen had gone dark, and I was wondering if it was frozen or not.
In retrospect, it probably wasn't frozen.
I held down the power button to force it to shut off, so I could switch operating systems and continue importing data off SD cards.
(Getting video off iPhone required MacOS, getting video off everything else required Win10... I tested the Sony & Canon video copying tools under MacOS before I left, and they were far more reliable under Win10. Also, external NTFS drives require Win10 to write to, and I was copying data to/from other people.)
Now, because I'd set up this MacBook to be a video-capture workhorse running Win10 and MacOS, I needed a filesystem that could be read and written by both. (NTFS can only be read by MacOS and not written.) exFAT to the rescue!
exFAT is NOT a journaled filesystem... it is not a robust filesystem. If you corrupt it, it is more difficult to recover the data.
Attempt to recover the data I did. For many days data recovery tools scanned the 2TB exFAT drive sitting inside my MacBook where the DVD-RW drive once was (how my MacBook can hold ~4TB of video data). For many days I also performed data recovery on the SD cards I'd performed capture directly onto, in case the data could be recovered off the cards themselves.
...the result was SOME data recovery (some off cards and some off the HDD), but not all. Not nearly all.
I lost many of MY video captures. I lost some of OTHER PEOPLE'S video captures... I was freeing up space for them so they could re-use their own SD cards the next day, too.
So this video of Troels of Seaborg Tech is a pretty perfect example of the result. You'll see 2 other cameras in the shot (across the table), the data from those is gone. You'll see a tiny bit of Joseph Monroe who was also asking Troels questions... only a tiny bit of Joseph's audio survived... really only my Q&A with Troels survived in full, and Joseph's questions were rendered almost useless.
3 days of lectures... I think almost all Day1 survived. Day2 was hit-and-miss. Day3 I was at a national lab and I wasn't helping capture lectures, so that's sort of hit-and-miss just due to far less coverage in the first place without me... most people's video capture gear was at the lab on Day3. Andreas MIGHT have more Day3 coverage I haven't gotten a copy of yet... waiting to find out.
Before the Next Trip
To avoid this happening again, obviously I'll be happy to wait for-frigging-ever for my MacBook to power down, if it wants to take forever to power down. (There's no hard-drive activity LED on the thing... so I took no flashing light to mean "done" when it meant nothing.) A lit-keyboard is enough to make me wait patiently all night now.
Also, I'll be purchasing some software like this, so I can use a more robust (journaled) file-system to hold the video data, instead of exFAT. So if I do have a failure, the recovery process should yield better results.
And I'll be spending much more money on additional SD cards. I've always had enough to run every camera all day, and pull the data off all night (freeing up cards for next day). Going forward I'll have enough cards to capture every single day of lectures and interviews, with no need to re-use then the following day. Triple my card inventory.
I'll still import off the cards every night, but that will be for data redundancy, and not to make space. (I'll be copying not moving.)
Data Sharing Saved Day1
Jonah was a guy capturing as much lecture as he could, with a 4k point-and-shoot photo camera. He had an external hard drive. He let me copy all his Day1 capture, and I gave him a copy of my Day1 capture. It was Jonah's copy of my Day1 footage that completely survived my exFAT disaster.
(So... yay for sharing data among video capture volunteers.)
But I hadn't copied Day2 to him when disaster occurred, which is why Day2 was hit so hard.
That's the Worst of it
I've sent hard drives to Jonah and Andreas. I've shared Premiere Pro project files of sync-ed data with them. Will be up to Andreas (ThEC organizer) to see how he wants to edit and release those conference videos, as far as the official event videos go.
I attended ThEC2018 having arranged with Andreas that I'd help capture, I'd share my footage, and of course I'm happy to help share my put-footage-in-sync efforts.
ThEC will release official lecture videos, and I'll release a few more narrative videos (such as a Thorium Remix) leveraging all the footage.
Still More Footage to Organize
Having attended ThEC2018 didn't mean I was done with ORNL-MSR-2018 footage (the interview footage).
And there's still interview footage of ThEC2018 to put in sync.
...so I've got lots to do. Will keep you all posted as I go. Definitely we've captured some great stuff over last 2 months, almost all of which survived... if one takes a step back from ThEC2018-Day2 disaster, where my mind has been for past 3 weeks.
Thanks to Troels Schönfeldt for putting up with a Pub Interview
Frankly, this was done in a pub because that's where we were, I needed to finish copying some Day1 data (MacBook on floor of Pub) to Jonah's external HDD... aaaand it was cold outside.
Some "normal" interview footage of Troels was also captured: Troels gave a presentation. Troels was in the MSR-Forum discussion. But I figured Troels-in-a-bar wouldn't intercut well with "normal" stuff, so I kept it as its own thing.
A liquid moderator... he wouldn't say what it was, but it occurs to me that beer contains both hydrogen and carbon atoms.