Corrupt .mov files from 5dii – odd problems :(

[Steve Crow]

Do the cards play back okay while still in the camera? If the card’s “directory” is corrupted then I am not surprised you are seeing messed up data too. Besides trying different recovery programs I don’t know what to suggest – you may just be out of luck but I often hear stories of people recovering at least SOME of their data off corrupted cards.

Steve Crow
Crow Digital Media
http://www.CrowDigitalMedia.com

[Jessica Marasovic]

thanks for your quick reply steve.

to be honest we were really pressed that day and didnt discover the error till after the card had been erased :/ – and weve used the same card since with no apparent problems :s

[Steve Crow]

Oh that’s too bad, it’s for exactly this reason that I never format a card unless the project is basically over, but I have about 10 16GB SD HC cards to work with – so as I fill up a card, I copy over the complete content of that card (including the directory structure) to two different hard drives and then put the SD card away until I am 100 percent sure I won’t need it again. Well, don’t feel too bad – this is how we all learn.

If we assume that your cards were actually functioning properly then the error must have occurred while the data was being copied over your computer. To be honest I’ve never seen a copy error happen unless like the computer rebooted, went into sleep mode, lost power or something equally strange happened right in the middle of the process.

I have heard of files getting corrupted if the camera lost power while filming or if the card was allowed to fill up to the point where no more data could be written to it by the camera – both events would cause the file not to be “closed” properly. Even in those cases, it should still be possible to recover at least some of the files with the kind of software you’ve been using.

I really hope you are eventually able to recover your files, I am sorry I have nothing to offer you other than sympathy! 🙂

Steve Crow
Crow Digital Media
http://www.CrowDigitalMedia.com

[Jessica Marasovic]

Thanks for all that steve, v informative….

im beginning to think it may be a faulty usb cable on the card reader – tho I still dont understand why the “recoverable files” are from earlier in the day – not the ones shot at that time… :s

thanks again for ur time.

[Steve Crow]

When you “delete” a file off a storage card (or a hard drive for that matter) all you are really doing is “marking it for deletion” – in other words telling the card that the space is available to be written over and used again…until that physically happens, the data is actually still there and can be recovered by “unmarking it” – so I am thinking what you are seeing are deleted files that remained on the card and haven’t yet been written over

It’s not clear to me if you actually completed the entire recovery process or if you were only looking at a preview of the recovery. It MAY turn out that if you actually completed the recovery you would find the video you expect but because the card’s “table of content” got messed up the preview was from early in the day.

Steve Crow
Crow Digital Media
http://www.CrowDigitalMedia.com

[Jessica Marasovic]

thanks Steve

I had held a forlorn hope that that might be the case – but the actual footage itself – not just the previews -was from earlier in the day – tho the clip duration, names etc didnt match – its almost as if the data was simply renamed in different segments, but no new tracks were written…

no quite sure what the lesson is here :s tho’ new a 5d iii with 2 card slots might be handy 🙂

thanks again for your help & advice

[Steve Crow]

No worries Jessica, all the best to you

Steve

Steve Crow
Crow Digital Media
http://www.CrowDigitalMedia.com

[David Parkar]

May be header file of that footage got corrupted. Don’t worry Nowadays numerous MOV repair tools are available on the internet. I used one utility “Remo MOV repair tool” and this user-friendly software repaired my MOV file in just a few clicks. You can also try it.