Video Horror Stories (page 3)

My worst nightmare came true as I was editing one of five springtime weddings I had already shot. I've been shooting wedding for three years, and each year my client list gets bigger and stronger, and I've often taken on several weddings in the same weekend during the peak May-June wedding season. This year, I shot three weddings in one weekend, and two more the weekend after, with a promise to each wedding couple of getting their editing video out in two weeks. I was really scrambling to finish them and was toggling back and forth between them as I captured video for one, did the rough cut for another, and waited for the third to render when it happened. All power to my system made a slo-o-o-w droning noise, then it all shut down. Try as I might, I couldn't reboot the system.

As the horror of it all set in, I realized I didn't just lose the partially-edited versions of the current weddings I was working on, but all the presets, all my saved files, all my photos and all my extra clips I hold for transitional effects. And a whole lot more. I still had the raw footage of these weddings I was working on, but I had to buy a new hard drive and re-capture the footage and start all over again. The other files were never recovered. What did I learn from this? I really understand my grandmother's quaint homily, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." I now have extra drives, I defrag a lot and I always save footage I'm going to use later to Mini DV tapes.
Brent Smith, Smith & Sons Weddings & Events

As painful as it is to admit, as competent and good as we are at our craft, we do lose a shot now and again. Over the years, we've learned that the KISS rule (Keep It Simple, Spielberg) will sometimes protect us from the worst. We hope you, our readers, have learned from our mistakes and are right now cleaning your camera lenses, checking your audio levels and getting familiar with your gear with zealous devotion to the art of video producing.

Videomaker Managing Editor Jennifer O'Rourke is an Emmy (tm) award-winning videographer and video editor.