Thanks for all the suggestions. Turned out to be quite a chore.
Said staff tried recovery on his own using Sandisk's free
software. Mounted them on a Mac, which immediately wrote it's
hidden 'dot' files to the cards -- Trash, Spotlight index, etc.
What took me completely by surprise is that, unlike SD cards, CF
cards have no write protect mechanism! So as soon as he put them
on a Mac, they got written to, which apparently did some damage.
Long story short, got most of it back.
For posterity I'll run through the process I took; maybe it will
help someone in the future.
First tried recovery on Windows and Linux, hoping those OS's
would not write unasked data to the cards.
Linux
1) First did block copy of the cards (not OS level file copy...).
That way I had backups to keep working with should the cards get
further screwed up during recovery attempts.
2) Attempted to use the testdisk/photorec. Testdisk gets back bad
partitions. It only found the newly formatted partition.
Expected, I guess. Photorec is designed to find photos, it didn't
find any of the .mxf files from the cards.
Windows
1) Tried Recuva. www.piriform.com/recuva. Didn't find anything
for me.
2) Tried Stellar Data Recover.
http://www.stellarinfo.com/digital-media-recovery.htm No .mxf
files found.
Back to a Mac
1) Wondershare's Photo Recovery software advertised it's ability
to find .mxf files, so I gave it a shot.
www.wondershare.com/data-recovery/photo-recovery.html
On 'Deep Scan' it found all my .mxf files. Recovered to a hard
disk. However, most of the files had serious problems. Somewhere
along the way, I've installed a codex that lets QT play mxf
files. But multi gigabyte files played only a few seconds. Some
files wouldn't open at all.
Could not import into Avid.
Discovered VLC 0.9.5 would play the mxf files with the correct
lengths. But VLC cannot convert them to a good quality file.
(Interestingly, I downloaded the latest VLC (v.2) hoping for more
conversion options... and the new VLC cannot play the files!
v.0.9.5 stays on my hardisk!)
But that gave me hope to keep looking. Went through another bunch
of software that claimed to be able to convert mxf files. Thought
was to convert the mxf to something I could import into the Avid.
Most software could not load the damaged files.
2) Finally found Pavtube MXF Convertor.
www.pavtube.com/mxf-converter/ It was able to read all the
files and convert them to Avid DNxHD 220 .mov files.
Some of the converted files were still damaged, but the Pavtube
software chugged through them all, at a pretty good clip.
Final result, 127 clips found and converted, 113 successfully
imported into Media Composer.
Good enough.
Many thanks,
Tim Selander
Tokyo, Japan
On 3/29/13 10:13 AM, Tim Selander wrote:
> Bitten in the butt by the tape-less age we live in, once again.
>
> Our data wrangler formatted two CF cards that had not yet been
> off-loaded. Shot with and formatted by Canon XF305. Have not been
> touched/recorded to since the format.
>
> Other than a re-shoot, what are my best options for recovery of
> the material on the cards??
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tim Selander
> Tokyo, Japan
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