Restore from an AVI?

[quailman]

Hey, any help with this would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

I’m doing an animation for work. I’ve been rending 5 scenes on 4 separate machines for more than a day now and guess what… Power Failure. 3 of the scenes had (thankfully) finished rendering, no problem there, but the last two, well… they were around 90% complete each. The battery backup on those systems failed: have I lost the render result? I was rendering to uncompressed (raw) avi.

I know when blender renders to .avi it appends the render result as it completes each frame. Is there a way to retreive those rendered frames? The .avi files won’t open in any player, and blender doesn’t open them, but there’s more than 24 hours worth of rendering in those frames! any way to get it back out?

I’ve started rendering again those two scenes from frame 1. But I’ve set the .avi files aside, hoping that someone has a great trick for me to save me 24+ hours wait time.

Thanks for any replies. My looming deadline thanks you too.

[Friday13]

I haven’t tried any .avi repair utility, but next time remember to render as an image sequence instead of going directly to .avi.

[86point5]

Can’t vouch for it, but try this: Digital Video Repair

It says it is for that kind of occasion.
(You didn’t say what OS, so I’m assuming Windows)

–

Next time, take the advice of Friday13 - never render right to AVI. Render to an image sequence, that way you just need to pick up where you left off.

[Samir]

Since the AVI wasn’t completed properly, it is probably missing a ‘header’ which is written last. Restoring a complete header section should solve the issue. If the utility suggested by 86point5 above doesn’t work for any reason, you can also try the AVIRepair utility here:
http://www.pk3.org/Astro/index.htm?software_utils.htm

Best of luck,
Samir

[mzungu]

I’d bet that VirtualDub (windows) would open them and allow you to re-encode the avis. Like Friday said, tho, never render direct to avis or movs for that very reason. IMO, PNG is the way to go for its lossless compression and alpha channel support. (BTW, wrong forum for this question, too… )