Data Recovery?

So guys, here's the story. I am working with a bunch of friends on a video project for school. We spent several days filming on a camcorder. But today, when we were working on a last scene, the camcorder said that we had 0 minutes left. We thought that meant we had less than a minute of recording, and since the scene was only a few seconds long, we chose to film it anyways. But now, we have a problem accessing the video files on a computer. When we insert the disk into a computer, it says there's no data on it. We can't even play back the footage on the cam, which gives us an access error. Does anyone know a way to recover our data on the disk?

 

Hmm, when you put the disk in your comp how much data does it say its used?

 

Well it says there is 0 bytes on the disk, so that's probably because my computer can't read the format. My other group members are taking the camera and disk home to check, but we're afraid there's a chance that we lost our footage.

 

I assume the camcorder saves the video on DVD, correct? If that's the case, your computer won't be able to read any type of data on the DVD until it's finalized by your camcorder. I'm not a camcorder expert, but I guess it could be possible that your footage got corrupt somehow. I'm not sure where to go from here.. I guess you could put your disk in the computer and use a program like winhex to see if there's actually anything written to it. There should be if there was recording done.. it just won't be readable by the computer. Maybe there's software out there that could finalize the data without the camcorder?

 

Yeah it's a DVD. But the access error on the cam prevents us from doing anything to the footage. We can't even finalize the DVD. My friend is suggesting to plug the camcorder in the computer to view the raw files. Does anyone know if this would work?

 

Is the cam only doing this to this dvd? Does it give the error if you put in a blank dvd? I'm not 100% sure but if you plug the camcorder into the computer, it should show the same thing as just putting the dvd in, unless you have some kind of camcorder software that will read it.

 

The cam's only doing it this DVD. I'm going to find some software to read the files. Hopefully the data's not corrupted -_-

 

What's the brand and model of the camcorder?

 

I believe it's a Sony Handycam. I'm not sure of the exact model #, since my friend took it home.

 

After google searching, the only possible solution I can find is using "mydvd". I believe it's free. There should be an editing option in the program that should be able to see raw data (if there is any on the disk).

 

Thank you so freaking much. You might have just saved our grades . Definite +rep

 

Thank you Let us know how it turns out when you get the camcorder back.

 

Well we managed to recover most of the data. There's a few files that got corrupted, so we have to reshoot those scenes. At least we don't have to refilm everything

 

That's good to hear. What method did you use to recover the files?

 

My friend downloaded some software to access the files on the disk. I'm not sure if he used MyDvd, but I recommended it to him. I'll ask him about it later. Right now, I'm just glad we still have most of the footage.