GH2 How to repair a corrupted video from an SD card

V

VideoDave

Member
sI am a Panasonic GH2 camera user that recently recorded an event in Maui.
During the event there was a power failure to my camera which ended up with a corruption of the MTS file I was recording at the moment. The 30 minute file is still on my SD card but unreadable due to the fact it wasn't finalized.
I've tried several recovery software companies that advertise on the net but not a single one can handle this problem.
Most recovery sftw is able to recover deleted files. But this problem is different.
All of the data is there it just needs an ending or finalization.
Please help if anyone knows of a way to repair this type of problem.
I'm sure it is a problem many of us will have eventually using these type of cameras.
As a side note, before using HD I had a small application program that was written in house by a company called Serious Magic that would repair these type of problems very easily for AVI video files. So it's possible, just need to be able to handle the MTS file format.
 
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Wow - no replies yet?

Try looking on the Panasonic HMC-150 forum here. I know that data recovery from problem cards has been a huge issue for many of them, and the HMC-150 AVCHD file structure thing should bear similarities to the GH2 AVCHD file structure.
 
I've been able to retrieve and transcode MTS files that were unreadable due to file spanning errors, but it took a lot of trial and error to figure it out which I haven't formally documented. Would it be possible to make your file in question available for download so that I or someone else may take a shot at saving it? A theoretical discussion on how to fix it is nice, but I think working directly with the actual corrupted file will produce more definitive results.
 
I only wish I could download the corrupt file but I can't read or copy it. So there it sits on my SD card until I can find the utility that will fix it. BTW, what is file spanning errors?
I did find one utility that I purchased off the net called MTSRecovery, that read my 30 min corrupted video as 200 little 10sec files that weren't frame accurate. When I put them on my timeline in Premiere Pro I could see the corrupted video just fine but there was an awful glitch every 10 seconds. Their tech crew eventually told me their utility wasn't intended to fix such a problem as mine.
 
AVCHD video streams can only write up to 4Gb. Long clips that exceed this limit have to be spanned amongst multiple files to accomodate the entire duration. Spanning errors result in part of the whole clip being unreadable. This is a known issue with some higher bitrate hack settings. The errors I experienced were rather mild: the first part of the clip played fine, but the following span would be unreadable, albeit, ultimately retrievable.
 
I had a corrupted Card, and the program that worked for me was TestDisk . It's a windows (DOS command line) program, but when I tried everything else (and also got those 10 second clips with gaps between them) this was what gave me all my original clips. My problem was a little different though. My card got corrupted some how, but I could still see all the files, and access some of them. I (unintelligently) ran windows checkdisk and some how it managed to delete all the files. After running TestDisk it found everything and allowed me access all the files, even the ones that were corrupted. So give it a shot. It worked for me.
 
First htinla, thank you for your response. But what you just posted is in no way related to my file corruption problem.
It's probably my fault for not communicating the situation well enough. I fully understand the 4G limit of Fat32.
The video clip that is in question was only about 1.7G.
The GH2 is capable of recording 4G files which equates to about 35 min of continuous video. The corrupted file is well within the 4G limit.
The problem was power was pulled to the camera at some point prior to the 4G limit.
Side note: it's probably a blessing that FAT32 has this limitation because if I had lost the full 2 hrs before it would have been a disaster.
As it stands video clips prior to the failure and clips after the failure on the SD card are all readable and usable.
It's only the clip that didn't get finalized that is in error.
A recovery program that I purchased online was able to read the whole SD card including the corrupted file. I was able to see all of the video in the corrupted file in my nonlinear editing program (Adobe CS5 premiere).
The only problem the recovery software had was they read in all of the data in little 10 second segments. These segments where not frame accurate so there was a really bad glitch every 10 seconds.
Even though I could see all of the corrupted video it was...sigh...unusable.
So I'm desperately in search of a utility that can finalize my video clip or someone who can help me write such a utility.
I already have a utility that does this function for AVI files.
Seriously, this is a problem that will affect each and everyone of us eventually that use SD cards for recording.
There needs to be a solution!!!
 
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Thanks for your reply, but this is not a corrupted card situation, only a corrupt video file situation. I tried TesDisk and as powerful as it seems to be it could not address the corrupted file in question. Amazingly it pulled up files that I thought I had deleted and formatted previous to the current recordings but didn't see my corrupted video file...sigh again.....
 
VideoDave - I wish I had your card 'cuz I'd love to try and retrieve those files. A friend of mine had file corruption a while back, but I managed to salvage all his clips. I don't recall exactly how I did it, but I did use all the software tools at my disposal to find a fix.

Maybe you could link all those 10 sec. segments together on a timeline and re-render one uncut stream, perhaps smoothing out the junctures and glitches with short dissolves or re-aligning the clips. Anyhows, just try everything you can think of, everything your tech savvy friends can think of....don't give up, there is a solution out there, it'll show up eventually.
 
Big Mahalo to you gsr400!!!
I was just about to throw in the towel as well and tell my client and customers that there was missing video. I even talked to Panasonic tech support a couple of weeks ago and they told me they didn't have any such program.
Anyway, I downloaded, ran it and presto it corrected the problem with the corrupted file. It even dug up videos that I had on the card from before when I formatted it prior to it's current use.
Thank you so much, this is an essential tool to have and it's Free!
This means peace of mind in the future knowing that all is not lost.
 
VideoDave said:
Big Mahalo to you gsr400!!!
I was just about to throw in the towel as well and tell my client and customers that there was missing video. I even talked to Panasonic tech support a couple of weeks ago and they told me they didn't have any such program.
Anyway, I downloaded, ran it and presto it corrected the problem with the corrupted file. It even dug up videos that I had on the card from before when I formatted it prior to it's current use.
Thank you so much, this is an essential tool to have and it's Free!
This means peace of mind in the future knowing that all is not lost.
Click to expand...

Hurrah for GSR400 and this user forum, it's good to know we can rely on eachother for useful answers when the official support channels cannot.
 
VideoDave said:
Big Mahalo to you gsr400!!!
I was just about to throw in the towel as well and tell my client and customers that there was missing video. I even talked to Panasonic tech support a couple of weeks ago and they told me they didn't have any such program.
Anyway, I downloaded, ran it and presto it corrected the problem with the corrupted file. It even dug up videos that I had on the card from before when I formatted it prior to it's current use.
Thank you so much, this is an essential tool to have and it's Free!
This means peace of mind in the future knowing that all is not lost.
Click to expand...


I'm so glad to hear that the apps worked and your video was not lost. It's amazing that panasonic had them available...and for FREE. Also check out the other apps, they may be useful as well. I'm on a mac and downloaded the QT importer and viewer. Now I can use quiktime to view the mts files...good to have as a quick check to see the the footage is good without having to go into FCP.....Hope others will find this useful..
 
I am very glad I have found this thread. Any chance you can give a little more details about how you did this. Did you use the Recovery Utility first and then the Restoration?

Thanks in advance.
 
mw5j1 said:
I am very glad I have found this thread. Any chance you can give a little more details about how you did this. Did you use the Recovery Utility first and then the Restoration?

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

used recovery then restored the file structure. hope that helps!
 
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