Recovering a corrupt video file - HELP?!

[jamoo1980]

Hello,

A few months ago I captured about 2 hours of footage directly from a DV camera, via Firewire, into Final Cut Pro. This generated a file about 8.5GB large in the capture scratch. Unfortunately, the file seems to be corrupt - it won't play in Final Cut, nor Quicktime, nor VLC, nor anything else I've tried. But the data is there - the file is 8.5GB, so there must be something there! I suspect that the capture didn't finalise properly, perhaps the computer crashed or something meaning that the file header wasn't written properly. Any ideas how I might go about recovering the video?

Thanks
James

[minidv2dvd]

the video you captured, was it on one tape or two? miniDV tapes are only one hour long. if you had captured 2 hours the file size would be around 26GB. something didn't work, and you should capture the tape(s) over again from scratch.


[edit] welcome to the forum!

[filmboss80]

It appears to be a possible codec issue. Quite possibly, you did not maintain the DV format, or else the file size for 2 hours would have been more than three times that size, as minidv2dvd explained. If not a codec issue, your file size might otherwise suggest the capture process froze up about a third of the way in. Were you monitoring your captures?

Finalizing is done only for disc-based recordings, not tape-to-harddrive captures.

Also, as minidv2dvd asked: how do you get 2 hours from minidv source to a single file? That would require a tape change, forcing separate captures that would create at least 2 files.

There's something screwy going on here.

[jamoo1980]

Hello,

The footage was not recorded on to miniDV tape then captured; it was captured directly in to Final Cut, i.e recorded directly to hard disk.

I can't recapture from miniDV as it was never recorded on to miniDV in the first place.

I've tried importing into VirtualDub - no joy.

Any ideas how I could try to recover the corrupt file?

Thanks
James

[Bjs]

Theres another chance that while the file is not playable ... have you tried to export it in final cut pro?

[minidv2dvd]

final cut would have recorded in dv raw in a mov container. if there is anything there it would show up if you import it into final cut. file size would indicate maybe 40 minutes of dv.