Has anyone successfully recovered video clips after formatting their card (in camera format)? If so, what software did you use?

I just tried "EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Professional 4" but it couldn't find any video clips. I have used this program several times before with CF cards, hard drives and even a raid array with ~95% success. I had about 12-15 minutes and 20+ clips and either my idiot assistant or the new intern formatted the card, HOWEVER I haven't recorded anything since the formatting. A normal format of any other drive including CF cards and hard drives always has recoverable data on the drive so long as nothing has been written to it since the format. Thus, I would assume that SxS cards should have recoverable data as well.

I have SanDisk's Pro Recovery software as well but on a different PC. I wonder if that program might yield some results.

Btw, a few of the clips I re-shot already, but some are very important that I cannot ever get again because it was of a Hall of Fame Chicago Bears player from the '85 team - Da Bears! :)

Thanks

Try Disk Doctors Photo Recovery software. It's not cheap - I believe it costs about $50. The program worked for me after I had no luck with the SanDisk's Pro Recovery software. My card had not actually been reformatted, however. The files on the card had become corrupted. I believe it was because the camera was turned off before the files had finished writing to the card.

Best of luck to you recovering the files. - Jim

Had the same problem - Disk Doctor did miracles! i got all my clips back!

But you have to do one thing before you can use your files again after disk doctor restored them:
Go to you xdcam browser and choose "Import" and load all your restored clip-files in a new folder. Otherwise Premiere/After Effects or Final Cut wont open them and you can just watch them in VLC!
(It's not just to restore a xdcam-folder-system but xdcam-browser reindexes the restored files)

And one more thing: When i was scanning my formatted disc with disk doctor it crashed 3 times... i have no idea why, it just closed at about 60%.... but when i tried the 4th time it worked! I have no idea why, but don't give up when it crashed ;)

I may have got this wrong, but are there not two basic ways to do a format? In one case you just erase the table of the contents (so the computer doesn't think there is anything on the card, even though the data is unchanged until the card is rewritten to), in the other you actually erase all the 1s and 0s from every memory location.

Obviously the former situation should be recoverable from - the latter probably isn't. I hate to ask this Steve, but I wonder what type of format the {ex?} idiot assistant or the {ex} new intern performed?

Could explain why you've been able to recover in the past, but not this time?

The XDcam is probably doing "just" a quick-format - it just takes some seconds.
Doing a complete format (overwriting) would probably take much longer!

Hello, Steve

Have you tried using Treasured?
Treasured • Tool for Video Diagnostic and Repair (http://aeroquartet.com/movierepair/download.html)

With Treasured you can perform "DeepMediaScan" on your formatted card and map all existing footage.
Then with a repair kit specific to your XDCAM settings, you can recover the deleted footage.

Please check also this page about XDCAM footage recovery:
Recover XDCAM after transfer. Repair corrupt XDCAM clips (http://aeroquartet.com/movierepair/xdcam)

-- Benoît