Possible Fix for Corrupted Canon 5D MKII / 7D Footage

This method will restore picture only, if you need to recover audio from a corrupted EOS movie file, I can offer no help, but this solution may help some of those out there who have encountered this problem though. Best of all, it uses a free and very cool tool from Rarevision: 5DtoRGB

Regardless of how you arrive at the discovery of corrupted footage, the reaction will, with some variety be the same for us all. For me it came at the end of a very long edit (3 or so weeks) of a behind the scenes documentary. I won't bore you with extraneous details only that a folder had gone bad and select files within it lost their playback fidelity.

I first noticed this in the timeline and in rendered output as looping/glitchy playback, which ultimately failed but in the context of a larger edit of working clips, it was only that section that needed repair. This was my biggest edit so far and my second project in Premiere Pro CS5 since migrating from FCP, so I had some doubts about Premiere's stability but it performed very well throughout. To verify the problem as file based, I checked their directory and found that they were originating from one folder out of 30 (all of which were drag and drop copies from the CF card). This so happened to be footage from a Canon 5D MKII recorded to a Transcend 400x UDMA 16GB CF card. A total of 17 out of a possible 29 clips went corrupted, meaning, I couldn't playback or transcode (respectively) in Finder, Quicktime, Image Browser, VLC, Compressor,Clipfinder or MPEG Streamclip. There was no preview thumbnail in finder either.

Some shooters have had similar trouble with EOS footage and try to recover files with little success. I researched a few methods and got nowhere. One method involves pushing your footage back to a CF card and trimming the length in camera and then copying the new files over. It didn't work for me so I had to replace a few clips in my edit.


Not one to give up easy, I tried passing the footage through 5DtoRGB for transcoding and it worked! As mentioned above, this is a picture only fix, so audio is gone but for Music Videos or B-Roll, this could save some shots.