What causes it
You ran recovery software, it found your video files, the sizes look right, and none of them will open. There are two different reasons this happens, and they have different outcomes.
The recording was never finished. A video file has two parts: the footage, and an index that tells a player where every frame is. Most cameras write that index at the end, when you stop recording. If the battery died, the card was pulled, or the camera crashed or lost power mid-recording, the footage is there and the index isn’t. The file was broken before it was ever deleted or lost.
The software put the pieces together wrong. A long recording is often stored in several pieces around the card. When the index of the card is gone, recovery software has to guess which pieces belong together and in what order. When it guesses wrong, you get a file of the right size filled with the wrong data.
From the outside these look the same. They aren’t.
If you no longer have the card, or it has been reused, see files that won’t open or play. That page covers repairing the files you already have.
What to do right now
- Keep the original card exactly as it is. Don’t format it and don’t shoot on it. It matters more than the recovered files do.
- Keep the files that won’t play. Don’t delete them.
- Don’t convert, re-save or run them through a “fixer” that writes over the file. If you try a repair tool, work on a copy.
- If you still have the camera, put a different card in it, record a short clip with the same settings (same resolution and frame rate) and stop it normally. A working clip from the same camera is a useful reference for a repair. Don’t record it on the original card.
- Note which software you used, and whether the recording was interrupted.
What’s realistically recoverable
An unfinished recording is often repairable. The footage is in the file; what’s missing is the index, and that can be rebuilt using a good clip from the same camera as a pattern.
A wrongly assembled file is a recovery problem, not a repair problem. With the original card, I can go back and look for the pieces again. How well that goes depends on how scattered the recording was and what’s been written to the card since.
Both are Complex recoveries, quoted after evaluation.
When it isn’t
- The footage was overwritten. If the space was reused, there’s nothing for a repair to work with.
- The pieces can’t be found or matched. Some of a clip may come back and some may not.
- The file only looks like video. If the software filled it with unrelated data, the file is the right size and contains nothing of yours. That takes the original card to fix.
- Files rebuilt this way can lose their names and dates. The clip is the same clip, but it may come back with a generic name.