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Many camcorders today use an internal hard drive, rather than removable DVDs.  These hard drives are typically FAT32 and so recovery is fairly straight forward.  Probably the most common reason for data loss is accidental use of 'Delete All'.

The main area that needs care with when dealing with a video camera directly is accessing the drive.  For many cameras, when they are plugged into the USB port, they should appear as a logical drive.  If it is not possible to access the drive as either a logical drive, eg Drive F: or a physical drive, eg Phys-2  then CnW Recovery software will not beable to assist.

The best advice at this stage is to create a image copy (Use Image raw function) so that any accidental use of the camera will not loose any more files.

There are two procedures that can be followed to extract your video files

Deleted file recovery

Most video recorders use FAT32 as the disk file structure.  The first approach to take on recovery is to read the disk, and enable recovery of deleted files.  This is the preferable approach as filenames will remain intact.  If sections have been deleted, and then new ones filmed, the resulting files may not be complete, or fragmented, in which case some errors may be expected.  However, the vast majority of video will be recovered.

Raw Image recovery

The Raw Image approach should be tried if the deleted file dies not recover all the relevant files.  Once the files have been recovered, as MPEGS, it may be necessary to convert and merge them to make a viewable video disk.  Details are in the chapter on Camcorder recovery.