911! All audio didn't record? can be saved?
 

I just shot a love story with a couple and did all the audio recording with a H4N and a wirless mic, we changed the mic over to the girl and then she starts talking ... the girl.. didn't record at all, and I can't for the life of me figure out why..

Do you think it did record and i can't find the rest of the file? any ideas how to get the rest of the file back? I'm not going to touch the card again until somebody has an idea how to get the file back.

Louis

Did you pause the recording on the h4 when you changed the wireless mic?

No I didn't touch anything, I just moved the mic to the girl from the guy, and then obviously checked for levels on the h4n... I don't think anything happened to the wireless mic, because the file ends, its not just an absence of audio... its the end of the file.

If auto-record got turned on, that would turn off the recording when the wireless transmitter was temporarily turned off.

Or with people moving around it someone may have just hit the stop button.

Always monitor your recorder's output while shooting for this reason (among others).

I always have somebody monitor my audio... this time I didn't have a budget to spend so I just had my friend watch it... he's not really a video guy so I guess its possible something happened to it.. I'm going to continue to edit the story with the on board camera mic and see what I can come up with and then if they like it then reshoot the girls part.

How about ADR on her dialog using the track recorded from the on-camera mic as a guide track?

This sure sounds like operator error. Your friend hit a wrong button. Maybe he thought he pushed record and really put it into pause? As you say, the file ends, so there's nothing to try and reclaim. It's ADR for you.

Thanks guys for the help.... I'd really hate to ADR it as it was an interview and they are not professional actors I doubt they'd get the right inflection down to make it look like it actually happened, but we can see what happens. I guess I might just redo it. Have to figure out how to break the news to the clients.

Did the batteries die when you were recording? I had that happen once, and the zoom apparently didn't actually write the audio data to the file when it shut down. The file was there, it just had no data in it. Tried a bunch of file recovery things but nothing was there.