Memory cards · job record · NTG-2025-2057
Full-Size Files, and None of Them Will Play.
Overnight the card turned against him. Running a one-man video business out of Melton Mowbray, he had filmed a marquee wedding out in the Wolds, and he described the problem without embroidery: the last three files of the evening simply refuse to import
. His second sentence was the one that framed the job — every one of them still shows a proper file size, so the video has to be there
. The couple were away a fortnight and expecting an edit on their return.
Yours doing the same? Say what it is up to — looking is free.
0115 8220606
What went wrong, and why.
He had read it correctly. Recording happens in two separate acts. Frames are laid down one behind another as they are captured. The index goes on at the end, as a file closes properly: a table giving the start of every frame and its duration. Take the card out, flatten a battery or fill the media, and the frames sit exactly where they were put while that table never gets written. Nothing else gives an editor a way through a clip, so a file crammed with video and no map at all looks on screen exactly like an empty one.
The bench work this one took.
How the work runs →| Kit on the bench | What it did on this job | Why we reach for it |
|---|---|---|
| Klennet Carver | Made the surviving frames into files an editing suite will accept | It knows the internal structure of a video file; cruder tools give back fragments that play nowhere |
| PC-3000 Flash | Copied the card sector by sector before any other step was attempted | Reads the flash at chip level, bypassing the controller, matched to a maker-ID library we keep current |
| UFS Explorer Professional Recovery | Lifted the undamaged clips, and the folder layout, from that copy | Reads APFS, ReFS, XFS, ZFS and Btrfs where other tools give up |
What happened on the bench.
Copy first, and diagnose afterwards
Diagnosis waited until a copy existed. Somebody else's deadline is a reason to work faster; it is never a licence to gamble with the only original we hold. From that point everything ran against the image, and the card was bagged antistatic and set aside, in case a second pass proved necessary.
Secure the working clips before the hard part
Practically the whole evening came off the copy without trouble, and it was secured before anything harder was started. Only after that were the three problem files opened and worked on. What he had said stood up: all three held frame data; two carried an index that was half written; the third had none at all. Everything after that followed from it.
Take the pattern off clips that came out undamaged
Video seldom goes down in one unbroken run, and it is the scattering that beats one-click software, which will hand back something that plays nowhere. Undamaged clips filmed earlier that evening, same body and same settings, gave up the pattern. Each broken file was then rebuilt around whatever frames it still carried, and tested in the only way that proves anything: played through from the first frame to the last.
What was returned.
Two of them came back entire, watched end to end on the bench before either left here. The third runs cleanly until a few seconds before the end, where it stops; those last frames were still sitting in the camera's queue when the card came out, and never got onto the media at all. His edit reached the couple when they came home.
Start here if the same thing is happening to yours.
More card jobs on the log.
Sounds like yours? Switch it off before anything else.
£250 + VAT covers a card or a USB stick; a single drive is £300 + VAT; RAID and NAS start from £500 + VAT. Nothing is charged for the first look, and a fixed figure reaches you in writing before any chargeable work begins. Switch the device off, leave it alone, and post it in. On most jobs, no data back means no fee.