RED Undead VS R3D File Recovery

I've been told of the process of recovering R3D files from an accidentally formatted card but hadn't actually had to do it myself until recently. Having the format and eject buttons right by each other on a touch screen is a terrible idea. My suggestions to RED would be to could keep them away from each other or have it not format or eject unless you hold it down for three seconds. It was a terrible moment when the 1st AC and I both realized which button had accidentally been hit. I think both of our initial instincts were to yank the card, but using our brains for a split second longer made us realize that would probably corrupt the whole thing.

1st lesson learned: Assign eject to a hot key very far from any format buttons, and don't drink too much coffee before using a tiny touch screen.

First I tried the "R3D File Recovery" feature in R3D Data Manager. It only recovered a couple clips out of the eight that were on the card. It kept telling me I needed REDline, even though I re-downloaded and installed it a few times. Probably a human error that I will investigate later.

I didn't really have time to mess with the REDline issue, so I moved onto RED Undead (which can be found in the beta tab on RED support). The user guide is very helpful, but I will summarize and modify it a bit.

1. Open Terminal. You can type "redundead" (doesn't matter if caps is used or not) and it'll show you it is indeed installed. The "Incorrect number of arguments." line looks like it might mean something isn't right, but it is.

2. Enter " diskutil list" and it'll give you a list of disks your computer is using so you can use the name it gave it, like "disk2". For this example we'll pretend it's called disk2. Mentally add an r on the front, "rdisk2"

3. Create a folder where you want the recovered files to go. For simplicity's sake, I put a folder on my desktop called "REDUndead". Make sure you know the path to this folder (ctrl click, "Get Info"). My computer and user is named Data Pengu, so my path looked like "/Users/Data_Pengu/Desktop"

4. Type "redundead" SPACE "dev/rdisk2" SPACE "/Users/Data_Pengu/Desktop/REDUndead"
(the spaces are super important and don't forget to add an r in front of your disk#)

5. Hit enter!

Now is the part where I nervously waited and felt helpless without the visual of a progress bar. It'll go along and do its thing until it triumphantly says "Done!" In my case it recovered everything but the first clip, which I've heard from others that also got everything but the first clip. Actually, not only will it recover everything but the first clip, but also go on to retrieve anything else on the card not already written over. You can stop it from doing this by hitting ctrl + z. Watch the roll # to make sure it's still on the roll you needed to recover.

And voila! You have your zombie clips and can move them where they were suppose to be! I went through all of my recovered clips and found no errors.

This also taught me the importance of using Disk Utility and the end of each job to get everything on the card back to a true 0 since even when formatted, anyone can still pull your footage off cards before shooting on them.