OK, here's my dilemma-
A few years ago, my wife and I received a Sony Handycam as a wedding gift-since then, we've made good use of it, and now with the recent purchase of a MacBook we've been able to take advantage of iMovie to finally start editing the movies we've shot.
A few weeks ago, I took the camera with me to document the recording of an album I was doing with a friend of mine. En route to the studio, I picked up a five-pack of Memorex DVD-Rs. While there, I did shoot a good amount of footage, and left the camera with my friend to shoot some more as he was staying at the studio for an extra day. At that point I had only shot one disc's worth of footage (a half hour).
Upon getting the camera back a few days later, I was informed that, although he put in a new disc to shoot some more footage, the disc began to give him errors. I ruled out the possibility that he had done something to the camera or disc, as the camera and other discs worked just fine. Clearly something was up with the disc, but what was it? I did notice a few smudges on the back, which I've tried to remove as best I can, yet I still continue to get an error message.
The real issue is in regards to that first disc that was full of footage. I finalized the disc so I could import the footage into iMovie, however I now can't play back the footage in the camera, or import it into iMovie, or un-finalize the disc (I'm sure this is due to the fact that this is a DVD-R, up until now I've been using DVD-RWs). I know the footage recorded just fine, and I can see on the disc itself that it's been recorded to, so what exactly is going on here? Is this just a Memorex problem? Is it something else? Do I need to download something for my computer to access the footage for iMovie? Is my footage lost?
And yes, I've tried Isobuster but could not figure it out at all. I didn't understand the whole mounting/image process, plus it was creating a file that appeared to take up many GB of drive space, which I found hard to believe since the DVD-R has a capacity of 30 minutes. I also tried the program found at diskinternals.com/cd-dvd-recovery to no avail.
Thanks!