Success story: Lost file resurrection

[Ari Palos]

After 4 days of shooting B-roll on location revolving around an anchoring event, I was all set to roll on the all important shot. It was to be a one and a half hour continuos roll. After about 30 minutes in I noticed battery power quickly draining. I started to get nervous so I found a breaking point around the one hour mark, with one bar left on my Dionic 90, I stopped rolling, switched from card A to B just in case, and switched batteries.

Later, when i tried to offload card A, the card registered no-clips. But showed it had 20 Gigs of data used up. The camera required no Restore. Well after a small panic I used a $100 program to read each sector of the card and was able to "undelete" the .mp4 files.

Unfortunately the files were unreadable. They were the appropriate size but somehow corrupt. After two days of research I could not find anything that could read the .mp4 files. No VLC, no MPEGStreamclip, No FFMPEG, no Sony Browser, no JVC, nothing could open them. I tried all kinds of ways of putting them back on the card and forcing the camera to Restore by leaving off one of the other reference files. This was only successful in getting the first couple of frames readable. Still nothing could open the corrupt .MP4s.

I had almost given up… what do I tell the client? They were already skeptical of this new tapeless format.

Well on a whim search of XDCam I found this little program called Treasured. It is designed to analyze video files to see if there is anything wrong with their code. It opened the file and for the first time I saw referenced thumbnails of the video, spaced about every minute.

The way it works is you use the Treasured software to analyze the file and it sends the data home. In a few minutes I received a link to download a "Repair Kit" program which requires a registration key. In its demo mode it did a long process of rewriting some code and produced a file that I COULD OPEN. In demo mode the audio has white noise every few seconds as well as random jerky video.

After being convinced it would work and forking over a decent amount of cash (to save my reputation) it created intact quicktimes. No longer .MP4s, however.

Here is their site:

Aero Quartet: Video gets Personal on your Mac

I still don't know what happened. I don't know if the quick power drain on the Dionic is related or if I pulled the battery too soon after pausing and powering down. I will try to recreate the problem to avoid this nightmare again.

I should say that, though I am a regular visitor, this is my first post. I make a living as a DP and am posting this since this program saved my a-- and it was so difficult to find. If you find yourself with a corrupt MP4 file, I recommend trying the free analysis.

ari