Repairing damaged MLV files?

[Terry Tibbs]

Okay so, I shot some RAW footage which came out really nice, and I previewed them in MLRaw Viewer, and stupidly forgot to upload them, and deleted the file. Aaaargh!

Since that time, I also removed my version of the Nightly build and replaced my friends version before realising what I'd done.

now, after some trial and error I have finally found ONE program, iCare Data Recovery that appears to have recovered the files, however despite the file size being right, they won't load into either ML Raw Viewer or RAW2CDNG.

Here's a screenshot of what they look like in my folder:

http://oi59.tinypic.com/5wdsub.jpg

If anyone has any advice as to how these files might be repaired or recovered I would love to know

Terry

[Ivoprod]

I had similar issue , and I delete all 1 kb files and leave only normal size, and then mlrawviewer opened video normaly, or some clips work normaly and then in some point have error usually in end

[DeafEyeJedi]

Hate when that happens, @Terry Tibbs -- I had to remind myself to slow down and triple check before hitting that delete button.

Previously, I've tried numerous of programs for OS X and out of all apparently PhotoRec seems to do the trick nicely with MLV files although it isn't always perfect but does recover well for the most part.

[DivM]

Hey guys,

I had the same issue. Apparently, it appeared that recovering large video files is not a trivial task due to file fragmentation. My recovered video files looked like original, but I couldn't play them in media players. One of the solutions could be to analyze the entire SD card and collect video fragments one by one. However, this could be done only manually, as I haven't found any tools that can handle this so far.   

[a1ex]

The MLV file format has fairly straightforward headers => scanning the SD card image for VIDF entries could work. I can help with that - some months ago I've recovered most of the CR2 files from a card whose filesystem was zeroed out (and many of them were fragmented). You've already got an image of the raw SD card contents, right?

The rawcover.py script could be helpful, too.

I've also been thinking about backing up the FAT partition tables from ML, making data recovery jobs a lot easier. Maybe such a feature could be worth the coding effort, especially if you use ML for serious stuff. In my case, the lost & found files were holiday pictures.

[DivM]

Thanks A1ex,
Yes, I've created a RAW image of the SD card, as per this guide. And sent those guys the image file already. We'll see if they can do anything with it...
Anyway, thanks of the help!

[a1ex]

Sounds good. If they don't succeed, I'm tempted to give it a try, too.