Treasured's Movie Repair Guide -- Expected Contents

After securing the data and evaluating the situation, you will double-check that what you have found corresponds to what you expect to recover.

Too often a customer requests to repair a file and eventually discovers that it doesn't contain what he wants to recover!


What do I expect to recover?

When confronted with a damaged movie file, it's important to know what this file is supposed to contain. In case of a damaged memory card or disk, it's important to know how many MBs or minutes of footage I was containing before the problem occurred.

 

Try to summarize it like this: 

"I have lost a dozen of movie files of the kid's birthday party, representing around 10 minutes of DV footage."


Can the damage files contain it?

The information above will now help confirm or discard the damaged files as a candidate:

If you expect the damaged file to contain 10 minutes of DV NTSC footage, then the file size must be around 2GB. So you know that you can focus your effort on files whose size is 2GB or more.


Where is my file?

When the recording application crashes, sometimes it is not obvious where the incomplete movie file is gone.

Sometimes you just have a 0 kb, empty file in the location where the movie should be, sometimes nothing at all.

Every application uses a folder where it records the movies. Check common places for corrupt movies.


How do I determine what my files contain?

If you are a Mac user, free application Treasured should be able to determine in most cases what a damaged file contains. This information is important to determine whether the file is repairable, and what the cost will be.


Relevant information includes:

- Type of video (codec, pixel resolution)

- Presence and type of audio (codec, channels, frequency, ...)

- Recording application, device or camera, and settings used.


Examples:

DV NTSC recorded with Sony camcorder.

H264 video 858x480, with AAC audio, recorded with Vholdr ContourHD helmet camera

JPEG video 352x288, with PCM audio, recorded with Cycorder on an iPhone


Do it yourself

For Windows users (who cannot use Treasured), or when Treasured cannot determine the type of video, this information can be found by other means:


Mac users will find another movie recorded in same conditions (same camera and settings) and open it with QuickTime Player or SimpleMovieX. With Command - I, you display a movie inspector that contains video and audio information:


qtInfo.jpeg


Mac users can even go a step further and save the movie as a reference movie (Command - Shift - S in QuickTime Player, then specify "Reference movie", not "self-contained". Or Command - Alt - S in SimpleMovieX)

The reference movie is a very small file that can be attached to an email message and that contains all the movie information but not the media.


Windows users will find another movie recorded in same conditions (same camera and settings) and open it with QuickTime Player. This free software can be downloaded from apple.com website.


How do I know if the file contains the whole content?

Imagine that you have recorded your first parachute jump with an helmet camera, but the battery died at some point and now the file is unplayable. You want to know if the complete experience, from jump to landing, has been recorded. Maybe the battery died even before you jumped, in this case having the file repaired is pointless.


If Treasured gives you a preview of the file, it is very easy to know: Drag the preview knob towards the right end, corresponding to the end of the file, and check what you see: This is when your movie ends.


As an alternative, you can evaluate it based on the file size. The section below explains how to determine the duration of the footage inside a damaged file. If the duration is too short, then what you expect to recover may not be present.


Check footage duration

The size of the damaged file is proportional to its duration. Sometimes you can confirm or discard that a damaged file can contain your lost footage just by estimating its duration based on the file size.


Mac users can easily check this with Treasured built-in Time calculator.

Windows users will have to do some math:

If you have a good file recorded with the same settings as the damaged one, you can compare their sizes and do a simple rule of three: If size is half, then duration is roughly half.

If you have no reference file to compare with, you can use the Profiles table.


Check orientative pricing

Mac users can use Treasured: if it correctly identifies the footage, it will provide a price quote. (if you do "Send a Repair Request" but do not press "Upload", the quotation remains anonymous, you will not be contacted by Aero Quartet)


More accurate information will give you a more accurate cost estimate. In most cases, if you can specify more, the price goes down.

For example, repairing a H264 video file has a base cost of $79. But if the file comes from a Kodak Zi6 camera or a ContourHD helmet camera, cost is only $59.

Please use the interactive pricing chart to check current conditions in Aero Quartet website.  


Windows users, after collecting information about the repair (expected content, pricing), can fill the repair form.