Case file · Memory cards · BDR-2025-0907
Corrupted Footage From the Shoot.
Back from a production shoot in Italy, the card came home with casualties: few video files corrupted on the memory card
. The production company's read of it was precise and hopeful — the files are there but have been corrupted
, not deleted — and the schedule allowed no leisurely mourning.
Same symptoms on your desk?
01273 964902
The decode.
Exactly the right instinct. Professional video files are containers: an index describing where each frame sits, wrapped around the encoded picture data itself. An interrupted write — power loss, an early card eject, a full card — typically leaves the picture data written but the index unfinished, because the index is completed last. The footage exists in full; the map to it does not, and no player will touch a file whose map is missing.
Equipment on this case.
How a case runs →| Platform | What it did here | Why this tool |
|---|---|---|
| Klennet Carver | Hierarchical carving that reassembled fragmented video into playable files | Hierarchical carving that reassembles fragmented video other carvers return as rubble |
| PC-3000 Flash | Read the card at a low level, below the filesystem that was reporting damage | Reads memory chips directly, with a current chip database for automatic identification |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Recovered the intact files and directory structure from the card image | Stronger than most on the awkward filesystems — APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS, Btrfs |
On the bench.
Image first, even on an urgent job
The card was imaged before anything else, urgency notwithstanding — a production deadline is an excellent reason to work fast and a terrible reason to work on originals. Everything after this point happened on the copy, with the card itself untouched in case a second approach was needed.
Separate the intact files from the broken ones
The healthy files were recovered conventionally and set aside. The damaged ones were then examined properly: as expected, encoded picture data present across the card, container indexes truncated or missing. That distinction dictates the entire repair strategy.
Rebuild containers using the shoot's own good files as reference
Carving fragmented professional video is where general-purpose tools fail — they return fragments that no editor will import. Using healthy files from the same camera, same settings and same shoot as a structural reference, the broken containers were rebuilt around their surviving picture data and the results checked by playing them through, start to finish.
The outcome.
The corrupted clips restored to playable and delivered against the production's deadline, each one checked by watching it rather than trusting a file size. The card was retired from front-line duty with honours.
Related on the index.
More from Memory cards.
Recognise your own drive in this story?
Same rule as every case above: power it down, and let the diagnosis be free before any decision has to be.