Guide
The camera died mid-recording and now the video won't open
The most common failure of all, and the one that gets recovered most often.
The first minute matters more than everything else
Take the card out of the camera and set it aside. Don't record over it, don't reformat it, don't use it for the next outing: as long as that data stays where it is, there's something to work with. It's the only genuinely urgent thing.
Then, if your camera has an automatic repair — GoPro with SOS, Insta360 with its own tool, many DJI drones re-checking the card at startup — now is the time to try it, with the original card inside.
Why a properly recorded file becomes unreadable
Cameras don't write video like a document saved in pieces. They write the pictures in a row as they shoot and leave for last the map saying where each frame begins, audio included. That map is a few tens of kilobytes on a file of gigabytes, but without it no player knows where to start.
When the battery comes loose, recording stops an instant before it gets written. Hence the paradox in front of you: a file as heavy as it should be, full of your footage, that no program can open.
First things first: is your file recoverable?
The check takes two seconds, it's free, and the video is never uploaded anywhere: the analysis runs inside your browser, on your own computer.
See if it's recoverableWhat not to do, under any circumstances
- Don't reformat the card: it's the one thing that makes recovery hard or impossible.
- Don't record anything else on that card, not even a few seconds of test.
- Don't hand your only file to a program promising automatic repair without making a copy first.
- Don't delete files that look empty or oddly sized: those are often precisely the ones holding the footage.
How it gets put back together
The missing map is rebuilt from a healthy video shot on the same camera with the same settings. It isn't blind guesswork: that file holds the blueprint this model uses to write its index, and it makes it possible to find the start of every frame inside the broken file.
The result is your video, at its own quality and with its own audio, inside a new container. In most cases only the final fraction of a second is missing.
Questions I get every time
How long before it becomes unrecoverable?
As long as you write nothing else to that card, time isn't working against you: a file left sitting there is recoverable months later. It's the first new recording that does the damage.
My computer says the file is 0 bytes.
Then the problem isn't the index but the allocation: the card lost its reference to the data. Recovery is done on the card itself with data recovery software, and it should be attempted before writing anything over it.
Can I try it myself?
Yes — there are free tools that do this job, the best known is called untrunc. They run from the command line and still need a reference video. If you're up for it, go ahead: all you need is for the original to stay untouched.
If you'd rather I handled it
You send me the file and the reference video, I send you a preview of the recovered one, and only then do you decide whether to pay. Twenty euros per video, thirty-five for up to five files from the same device.
You only pay if the video turns up.