Recovery of Camcorder Disks

It is a fairly common problem for Camcorder disks to fail in a way that they can not be read on a PC, or the original camera, but can be recovered by CnW Recovery software. This is often due to disks not being closed, as well as dirt, or camera problems. The failure is normally associated with the start of the 1.4GB DVD disk not being written, or becoming unreadable. The success rate of restoring corrupted video DVDs with CnW Software has been extremely high.

When such a disk is placed in a DVD reader, it can be very slow starting CnW Recovery. Be patient, and after a few minutes, the program should start up correctly. This is due to the fact that the DVD reading is trying to access the disk, and failing.

The CnW Wizard will normally detect a video disk that has failed due to the missing header information, and will then allow the files to be recovered as individual chapters on the hard disk. The screen dump below shows that a disk will be detected as Corrupt Video.

The organisation of the disk is dependent on the type of camera being used, so the chapter sections make be in the range of 8-10 seconds each, or a long sequence on the disk. The chapters may then be appended with normal DVD creation software. There is an option within CnW Software that allows a video stream to be recovered as a complete stream, or as individual chapters

CnW software has built in tools to join sections of mpeg files together, and create relevant video control files.

For very simple use, there is a One Step function to automate the complete process

On some video camera systems, the resultant recovered files can represent a very long section of recording. For edit purposes, it is often best to have short groups. There is a built in utility, under ‘Tools’ to enable a files to be split.

To evaluate the software please download the demo. The demo will indicate the the size and number of MPEGs that could be recovered, but it is not possible to view the video (yet) with the demo.

Some mini-DVD-RW will show up as blank disks. It can be clear that data has been written, but CnW (and other programs) will indicate that the disk is blank. The probablility is that the disk has been erased, or formatted. Fortunately, CnW have developed a technique where these disks can be recovered, but is not part of the software. CnW provide a service for £35 to recover video and return the disks world wide, with a no fix, no fee basis. Please contact CnW for more details