data recovery of m2t files from a compact flash card

Hi!

During the last couple of days I was shooting two concerts with a Sony HVR-Z5E that recorded to Kingston 32gb compact flash cards via a HVR-MRC1K memory recording unit. Because I am an idiot and now know better I have only recorded to the cards and not to tape as backup. Now one of the cards seem to be damaged. It is still recognized in windows (not on a mac). When I try to access the sub folder that has the m2t files in it I get an error message saying that the folder is linking to a ressource that doesn't exist. I have tried various computers and cardreaders, the MRC1K cannot access the card anymore either. I have looked into data recovery tools and I have found some that seem to be optimized for compact flash cards but they seem to be specialized in recovering photos and not video files.

Any help or software suggestions would be immensely appreciated! The material on the chip is (of course) very importand to me and even more so to my employer...

Thanks!

Hello Adalberto,

yes I was indeed able to recover most of the files using a free data recovery tool called Photorec/Testdisc. You can download it here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

It doesn't have a GUI but it was pretty easy to use. The only downside was that it recovered not two or three big m2t files but many small ones with garbage names and a .mpg extension.
But nevertheless it was able to recover around 90% of the material and I was very happy that it worked.

Hope it works for you, too!

Best regards,

Mike

Hmm if I remember correctly I converted them into movs using Mpeg Streamclip and then manually stitched them together in Final Cut Pro.

Hope this helps!