I supervised the visual effects, on set and post.  Once the design, model, and textures were complete I stepped in and did shader design and setup in Maya using VRay.  Using VRay RT I managed to get a lighting rig for the main character within a couple of hours.  Once that was completed I started work on the hero comps which would lay the groundwork for all the shots of the show.  I knew I would have to build a system that was easy to use and quick since many of the people on the show had either not used Nuke before or were not seasoned compositors.  Aaron himself did a ton of comps also as he has a very keen eye, as you can imagine.  I would pop in to the Aaron Sims Company from time to time while working on other projects to check on the progress and also help push comps to final.

Ultimately, I am really happy with the final product and hopefully others are as well.  The entire team on this did a great job and it was seriously a labor of love for all involved.  It’s always excellent to work with people passionate about story telling and making good looking imagery.  This was one of those projects that had those properties in spades.  Many kudos to all!

Well, Linux (Ubuntu) to the rescue.  I downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 LiveCD because I knew I could use ddrescue to copy sectors and the software would skip the bad sectors.  Groovy.

Well, it took a bit of fiddling to get it to work so here is what I did.

Step 1 : Grab Ubuntu : http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

Step 2 : Once you have booted in and are “trying” out Ubuntu you will need to dd_rescue package.

If you downloaded the 32 bit Ubuntu go here :
http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/i386/ddrescue/download

If you downloaded the 64 bit Ubuntu go here :
http://packages.ubuntu.com/oneiric/amd64/ddrescue/download

Pick a mirror and you can download/save the .deb file.

Step 3 : Extract the deb file

You should cd ~/Downloads

in here you want to extract the file like so :

ar x ddrescue_1.23-1_i386.deb

This will create several files :

-rw-r--r--  1 ubuntu ubuntu  1096 2012-01-10 07:22 control.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--  1 ubuntu ubuntu 22251 2012-01-10 07:22 data.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r--  1 ubuntu ubuntu 23540 2012-01-10 07:21 ddrescue_1.23-1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 ubuntu ubuntu     4 2012-01-10 07:22 debian-binary

You want to extract the data.tar.gz :

tar zxvf data.tar.gz

This will give you several more files but the one you want is : ./bin/dd_rescue

Step 4 : Figure out which disk you need to clone!

Get a list of disks on the system like so :

sudo lshw -C disk

This will give you manufacturer info so it will be easy to figure out which one is the new drive, etc.  Ok, whew.

It looks like so :

Step 5 : clone that sucker!

sudo ./bin/dd_rescue -v /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

This means clone the /dev/sdc device to /dec/sdd with verbose mode turned on.  Yes you can watch it clone.  It’s exciting.  Actually this sucks.  It’s hours and when it encounters errors it slows down like a stoned turtle.

That should do it however.  Hopefully the data is intact on the new drive!