*Emergency* Video footage missing on CF Card

[impactfuze]

Shot footage today on a rented Canon 5D Mark III

The footage was checked and verified on set.

Audio and video were perfect and functional (on the camera).

Took the CF card home to transfer files to the mac and the card was empty and the footage was gone.

I have raised a ticket with Canon customer support, But any sort of help or suggestion is welcome as I am working on a very thin timeline.

Thank you so much.

[FrancisW]

Codec missing ??

[impactfuze]

This was one of those strange one-off incidents that just did not make any sense to me.

I have been using the 5D in Uni and from rental stores since ages. Usually, my ritual for recording has always been the same (record footage, verify the footage on set on the camera, remove CF card and put it in its appropriate case, go home and transfer it to my mac).

It was really odd(and scary) that the one time it did manage to go sour was my first brush with a professional job for a TV gig.

I am taking this as a learning experience and going to put back up security measures in whatever way possible with my meagre savings as I really never want to ever experience that again.

[wq9nsc]

I am really glad it turned out OK for you and great job of persevering and rolling with the punches.  Hopefully you can laugh about this one day but that will probably be a long time in the future.  

On a couple of occasions friends have asked me to shoot weddings and I politely declined on both occasions just because I wouldn't want the nightmare of having a data loss.  And if I ever did anything like that I would shoot to both cards and still keep my fingers crossed.

Glad it turned out OK for you and hopefully you don't have nightmares about this event!

[impactfuze · Accepted solution]

Hey guys, boy it has been a weird 24 hours but I finally managed to get the footage, make it workable and send it across. Here is my solution map:

• I tried several expensive recovery software and most of them ended up being a huge waste of money and essentially garbage in my case. Photo rec a free software seemed to help me more than Recuva or Data Rescue 5 and it was sad that I spent all that money.

• The problem still remained that the videos got stuck on the first frame of the video and I was greeted with an uncomfortable loud white noise. It was really sad to see my footage but have it not work.

• Hours of research later I found out that while data recovery software might get the data back, they might not be able to re-encode the video to it's original format and might need supplemental repairing from a working video from the same camera.

• I found a software called Grau GmbH which claimed to do this however I did not have the camera with me (since it was a rental). However in my hard drive I did have some random footage that I had taken with my friend's 7D. (This is highly not optimal but my circumstances were desperate).

• Using the canon 7D video as a supplement to fix it, almost like magic, the grau software managed to fix the video and get it running again. Success, but there was a problem with the playback and the video and audio did not sync.

• The audio and video appeared to be playing at different speeds and simple syncing of starting frames and/or adding a delay to it did not seem to remedy the situation. For this, I wish I could research a better fix, but since I probably had 10 minutes before giving it to the clients, I spliced the video up (it was an interview) and fit it, resyncing it every 15 second intervals and cut some ambiance from the end of the video to make it seem natural.

In the end it worked and wow... The client has no idea what we went through to be able to get this footage safely delivered :') !!

Thanks for everyone who helped out and I do hope this helps someone in the future.

Cheers