Recovering Corrupted .MOV

[jeannoth]

I made a very important movie with Photo Booth today and the program accidentally crashed.
All I have left now is a corrupted .mov file that isn't playable.

I tried iMovie, VLC, Quicktime, Remo-Repair, Final Cut Pro and tried uploading it to youtube/vimeo. The only thing that worked was Treasured but they ask a $70 fee to repair a 10 minute movie.

Is there someone who is willing to help me to recover it please?
( sorry if this is the wrong part of macrumors to post it in )

[jeannoth]

Bump

[daybreak]

Have you checked your TIME MACHINE?

[floh]

Originally Posted by daybreak

Have you checked your TIME MACHINE?

That won't be much use if the video got corrupted while the programm crashed. Time machine wouldn't have any chance to make a backup...

To the OP: I could give it a shot. Considering it's PhotoBooth, the file won't be too huge. I'll probably PM you about an exchange place.

[floh]

Sorry. I took a look at your file, and there is hardly anything you can do.

Video containers (in this case the .mov file) contain the video and audio codec and then a lot of extra information on the used codecs, resolution, bitrates, framerates and so on. Most of this metadata (in the case of h.264, it is called "moov atom" if you want to google for it) has not been written into the file in the end, since your software crashed.

In some cases, such data can be recovered if you have a reference file from the same camera. Some tools can then just copy the needed moov atom to the corrupt file. But in the case of the iSight camera, the framerate, bitrate and stream information is not fixed but differs greatly from file to file, and I wasn't able to get any useful results.

You can send the file to the online ressource you mentioned and they probably will be able to repair it for $70. But they will have to (and that's why it's so expensive) manually analyze the chunk of data and create a moov atom from scratch. This takes time and years of experience.

Sorry, but I don't think there will be a way around this.

[jeannoth]

Originally Posted by floh

Sorry. I took a look at your file, and there is hardly anything you can do.

Video containers (in this case the .mov file) contain the video and audio codec and then a lot of extra information on the used codecs, resolution, bitrates, framerates and so on. Most of this metadata (in the case of h.264, it is called "moov atom" if you want to google for it) has not been written into the file in the end, since your software crashed.

In some cases, such data can be recovered if you have a reference file from the same camera. Some tools can then just copy the needed moov atom to the corrupt file. But in the case of the iSight camera, the framerate, bitrate and stream information is not fixed but differs greatly from file to file, and I wasn't able to get any useful results.

You can send the file to the online ressource you mentioned and they probably will be able to repair it for $70. But they will have to (and that's why it's so expensive) manually analyze the chunk of data and create a moov atom from scratch. This takes time and years of experience.

Sorry, but I don't think there will be a way around this.

I guess I have no other option then. Thanks a lot for trying though