Subtitles are basically done now except for final proofreading by Melanie.

Everything seems back on track, and I'm now 49:21 into the subtitles. Only 10 minutes left to transcribe.

WHEW. Everything is going to be fine after all.

Yesterday I brought my drive to "Disk Doctors" in Bellevue. Since it takes them a while to figure out what can be recovered from the drive, I spent a couple hours digging through old boxes, hoping to stumble upon the two missing backup DVDs. No luck. Today, 24 hours later, still no word from them.

So today I looked at the project again in the editing software. I wanted to see how much information they could provide about the missing clips. This way, I might be able to estimate how long it would take to recapture the missing clips from the original DV tapes, re-edit them into the timeline, etc. I figured it would be a pain in the ass but doable, and it would help sugarcoat the huge price needed for data restoration ($500 to $2500) if I knew that it would save me two more weeks of work.

Well, much to my surprise, the editing software kept a lot of information about the clips. In fact, it kept track of the exact in/out points of them on the original tapes. This means I would have a pretty easy time recapturing them.

But even better, I could select the missing clips and hit "batch capture", and pow! All the clips would be captured in one pass.

And that's what I just did. In a matter of minutes, I was able to recapture the clips from the DV tapes, and those gaps in the movie magically disappeared, everything looks exactly as it did before. No net loss.

Everything is also backed up on DVD in case it happens again. I still have to rerender the movie, but I can do that tomorrow when my replacement hard drive arrives.

Life is wonderful again.