Any way to salvage HDRX audio?

[Mike Harrington]

I did some interviews with HDRX turned on (by accident)...now the audio repeats itself in about 10 second chunks moving forward...and obviously out of sync...is this salvageable or is the audio toast?

[Mike Harrington]

i exported as audio from red cine....same results

[Matthew J]

People from RED told me there is no way to salvage.

[Mike Harrington]

unfortunate to say the least....

[Marc Wielage]

I am sad to say that this is a good reason why it's always best to have a separate sound recorder as a backup. Even a cheapo $300 Zoom recorder is better than nothing, provided the mike is positioned correctly.

We're paranoid enough in location sound that many (if not most) location sound mixers routinely double-record everything on both a hard drive and a compact flash drive or a DVD-RAM drive. That way, if one fails, you always got something else to fall back on.

I don't necessarily blame Red for this, and have encountered this with all kinds of digital cameras going back at least 15 years.

[Mike Harrington]

I totally agree marc...this was a real run and gun situation, so we didnt bother....
but lesson learned...the hard way

[Marc Wielage]

I'm sympathetic! Consider this a valuable lesson learned.

I think it would be a reasonable expectation for Red to at least build in a warning into the viewfinder when in HDRX mode, reminding the operator that it's all MOS. I have no problem with the sound not working (especially if it's essentially recording two sets of image files), but maybe having an alarm would be a good idea.

I have a million stories about disastrous shoots (none with me!) where they've gotten into post and realized the camera was running off-speed, or all the sound was horribly distorted, or the timecode was wrong, or the exposure was 3 stops off, or the lens back-focus was bad... there's so many potentials for disaster, it's amazing that all this gear works as often as it does. All you can do is shoot tests, be extra-cautious, and learn from the experience.

A pal of mine in the sound business has an excellent mantra:

Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Experience is that thing you get after you need it.


I have learned in life that much of what he says is sadly true.