Restoring Master Files

It is possible to restore an entire mastered program, or just a segment.

In our example, let’s say you want pull some sound bites from a Here and Now July 2016 interview with Paul Soglin. You could look for the raw footage of that interview, of course, or, possibly, restore the segment from the “Segment Master Repository”, but, for our example, we’ll pretend you need to grab it from the completed show.

You would start by finding the master file that contains that interview on the Video Search

On the Search page, files are organized into groups called “Archives”. Raw footage shot in the field, for example, is in the “Field_Media” archive. Master files for completed programs are in the “Production_Broadcast_Repositories” archive. You may want to select that archive to narrow your search to completed programs.

To find Paul Soglin’s interview, you can type “Soglin” into the Search field and hit “enter”, or click “Go!”. (You can narrow further by specifying the year, month, etc. via drop down boxes).

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Episode 1503 (the full House ID, which appears in the “File” column, is 2HNW1503HD) will appear in the search results, and you can view the preview file to find the Soglin interview, and note the timecode.

Viewing the preview file will allow you to see that the segment including the interview starts around 01:14:00;00 and ends around 01:19:00;00 (so, it’s about 5 minutes long).

If you are a Producer, and want to provide this information to an Editor so the Editor may retrieve the full-res master file, you would provide the timecodes above, as well as the House ID (2HNW1503HD) to the Editor.

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Now, to retrieve the master file, you would follow the steps above, and then click the “Dub” link in the preview window.

To “restore” a file, you want to check the box for “Restore”:

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Click “Submit” and you will see another screen where you can enter in your IN and OUT points, and enter your e-mail address (you can also view the proxy file from this page):

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After entering in that info, click “Submit”. You should receive (within a few minutes, depending on the duration of what you are restoring) an e-mail telling you it is available on sn_cirrus, in the DigitalDub\PMR folder:

You can import the file if it is an MOV (it should be a “fast import” of DNxHD material) or AMA Link it if it is an MXF.