Canon HF10 w/ Corrupted .m2t files

[greymalkin]

Hello All,

My wife and I just celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary and to make sure I had plenty battery/video space I ordered a high capacity battery and 32gb class 10 sdhc card for my canon hf10 camcorder. I just got back from the trip and when I went to playback the video on our tv the canon said "no scenes" on the camera. I went to look at the still pictures I had taken and noticed they were garbled too...

I'm not having a nice feeling about this..but thought I'd come to the experts and ask. I put the sdhc card in my computer and saw the folder structure was there and the m2ts files are there as well. The problem is only the first 5 or 6 play and show the thumbnail/time of the video. The rest show the name of the file and how much space it takes up on the card..but nothing will open it..I tried videoredo and tsmuxer and neithr of them can open the files. I'm currently running a chkdsk on the sdhc card to see if it was a corrupt filesystem. (Edit: chkdsk found no errors on the card). This was a new card that I had never taken video with before. now I'm wishing I had recorded to the built in memory!

Anyways..I'm not sure if the file is there but there's no header information or what the deal is. I never got any errors on the camera when recording the video. We've got some still pictures of the main events...so if it's gone then so be it! but there were a few things in there I'd really like to have if anyone has any suggestions for me..I don't mind if it's difficult or tedious.

thanks!

[racer-x]

You can try this: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital-image-recovery.htm

Or this: http://www.pcinspector.de/FileRecovery/instructions.htm?po=2&language=1

Good luck!

[vhelp]

i find it hard to believe that the sticks are bad. so don't give up on the tools just yet..keep trying all of them. don't forget that these cams, randomly at times still produce non standard clips and they are hard to open or read in most apps. give ffmpeg a go, -vcodec copy, etc. try dgavc and dgindex too. try avisynth, too..use the x="clip.mts", LoadPlugin( "C:\PLUGINS\ffms2.dll" ), FFIndex(X), FFVideoSource(x) methods, else, put it like this, one of them's gotta open a clip or two. if you find one or two apps are opening/reading, (then you know it just a weird write that went into the finalized cilp in the cam during shooting) but just demux those out, edit, and remux into a new container.

[greymalkin]

thanks for the words of encouragement vhelp. I've got the 32gb card in "lock" mode to make sure I don't accidentally write anything to it. I've copied all the contents off and I'm using one of the .bat file tools floating around on this site first (the MTS_2_MP4) that uses ffmpeg. If it bombs I'll definitely give dgindex/avisynth/the kitchen sink a try.

using ffmpeg I get a message eventually that says something like max resync limit reached. this is after seemingly going frame by frame through the video....trying to open it with another repair program says something like sync bit not found..if this helps.

with the ffmpeg .bat file, every file after that one that gave it problems says "Unknown Format"

[greymalkin]

ok..putting more peices together here..I think I know what might have happened. The last video clip that is somewhat readable is where my wife was recording something in the car...she apparently put the video camera down in the floorboard while it was still on (and recording). I went out to the car about 5-10 min later...saw that the video camera was turned on and so I turned it off. I'm guessing that turning it off while it was still recording was bad news...and perhaps that single event set up the domino effect of every file after that failing. I'm not sure if the file structure is that sensitive that one out of sync video file would blow it for every file after it...but just wanted to relay the events leading up to this.

I tried using an avisynth script with the ffms2 plugin but it says it can't open the files either. DGAVCIndex also cannot open it...

I ran photorec on the memory card and it was actually able to recover the thumbnails for each video clip, but only pulled the .mts files off that I could already play...any more suggestions?

[greymalkin]

someone told me I could use vlc and select to ignore sync errors but I didn't see any option like that..for now I still haven't been able to do anything close to open the file...still thinking the avchd file structure is very sensitive and once one thing gets "off" it screws up everything after...I think I'll just store the 32gb sdhc card somewhere safe in the hopes that one day I'll find (or someone will create) something to recover the headless frames in there :P.