While shooting a 4K video my camcorder battery suddenly die without warning. After I put in another battery, the camcorder said the video file was corrupt and would I like it to attempt a recovery, and warned that recovering may further corrupt the file. I said yes because I was worried if I said no, the file would be deleted.

When I got home the recovered file cannot be played by VLC. It is not recognized video format. So I tried some mp4 repair programs.

First program I tried is a wondershare GUI program. It showed a preview of the recovered file but to actually get the file I need to pay. I decided to try free programs first.

I found a free repair tool (recover_mp4) and it has been recovering the file for the past few hours. It was a command line program and ran very slowly, perhaps because it was printing some text per video frame to the screen.

Does Sony itself publish an utility to recover mp4 file? If not, what is the best 3rd party program for this purpose, paid or free? Best as in GUI based, cheap/free, can recover most corrupted files, etc.

If I ran into the same situation again, should I select yes or no to the "attempt to recover file" question from the camcorder?

I'm not sure on whether to say yes or no when it asks you.

However, I use sony sd cards and they came with a utility that repaired files when this happened to me.

There are very expensive options out there but their utility fixed it everytime for me. Would a shot and Sony cards are good quality and not too expensive.

M.