DV Captured Footage from Premiere Randomly Disappearing from New Hard Drive

[mikep13649087]

I have Captured over 1.5 tb of old family video-tapes (8mm and Digital 8) on an old 2011 Firewire iMac using Premiere. I captured the videos directly to a brand new 2TB Western Digital Easy Store drive formatted as exFat for cross-compatibility between the iMac and my Windows PC for editing.

I started going through the process of editing the videos in Premiere and encoding the original .MOV files into .MP4 and MPEG2 formats. I was sorting through the files, I noticed that a handful of original video files are missing that I know that I recorded. If I select "View Hidden Files" on WIndows, I see the missing videos as 4kb files that cannot be played. When I plug the drive back into the Mac I don't even see those 4kb files.

A couple of times when plugging the drive into the Windows PC, I get a "This Drive Needs to Be Repaired" warning, and I allowed it to go through the process of fixing things. I always eject the drive before removing it both on Mac and PC so I'm not sure why errors are occurring.

I'm guessing there's no way of recovering the files but I'm open to any suggestions. I'm just wondering if I go back and capture the files again from the original tapes, if more files are going to be randomly deleted. I ran chkdsk on the drive and it said that "Corruption was found while examining files in directory"

What do I need to do to prevent more files from being deleted? Do I need to buy another new Hard Drive before I continue? (Definitly not Western Digital again). I've never had files start to delete randomly on a brand new drive.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Mike P,

How's it going? Let me put my DV brain back in there and see how I can help you. 

I have Captured over 1.5 tb of old family video-tapes (8mm and Digital 8) on an old 2011 Firewire iMac using Premiere. 

Nice!

I captured the videos directly to a brand new 2TB Western Digital Easy Store drive formatted as exFat for cross-compatibility between the iMac and my Windows PC for editing.

OK. As I recall, these drive are limited to 4GB file sizes, aren't they?

I'm just wondering if I go back and capture the files again from the original tapes, if more files are going to be randomly deleted. I ran chkdsk on the drive and it said that "Corruption was found while examining files in directory"

What do I need to do to prevent more files from being deleted? Do I need to buy another new Hard Drive before I continue? (Definitly not Western Digital again). I've never had files start to delete randomly on a brand new drive.

Delete those problematic media files. I don't think you should try recapturing those specific clips. You may get into trouble again as I suspect they are over 4 GB in size. You may need to log and capture new clips that are maybe shorter and smaller in file size but have the same video footage in them. Can you try that?

Thanks,
Kevin

[mikep13649087]

Thanks for the reply.

I haven't heard of the WD Easy Store Drives or the exFat format having a 4gb limit for files. I did a quick Google search and found that Fat 32 has a 4gb limit for individual files.

I also have many other video files on the drive that go up to 13gb that still remain playable. on the drive.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Mike,

Maybe it's files that are cross-platform or originated on Mac are limited to 4 GB. Sorry, that I may be a little ignorant here. I am just going through the possible steps I might take. Hope we can figure this out.

Thanks,
Kevin

[mikep13649087]

I'm thinking more and more that it's a defective hard drive because these video files recorded fine and I remember playing some of them back to make sure they were recorded. Now they're just gone, and on Windows, all I get are "ghost files" of the original clips.

There are also hidden "ghost" files for some videos that are still in-tact and playable on the drive.

[Andy 1968]

There is no 4GB files size limitation. It does seem as though the hard drives file allocation table got corrupted. Get a new hard drive and try it again. 

[mikep13649087]

Should I not use exFAT on the new hard drive? It seems like an unstable file system. I think most out of box hard drives come with NTFS but then it won't be read/write compatible with Mac and PC

[Andy 1968]

I have a Mac and a PC and the majority of my drives are formatted to exFAT. Having said that even if I did not have a Mac and PC I would still format most my drives to exFAT. 

[chrisw44157881 · Accepted solution]

you should format the disk on the Mac first in exfat since mac has a slightly different way to encode the data and is more sensitive to the quirks of cross platform drives.

also, exfat is not journaled, which means any power loss can create corrupted files. another option is using NTFS plugins for mac like paragon (which is a good professional investment for journaled drives)

you can also test the health of the drive with health tools to see if the drive firmware is detecting cycles crashing.

[mikep13649087]

Thank you for the advice.

I actually did format this drive as exFAT on the Mac first. Scanning the drive on Windows now comes up with "no bad sectors".