Today my camcorder (sony fdr ax100) battery died suddenly in the middle of recording. After I put in another battery, the camcorder asked if I wanted to recover the file and I said yes.

The recovered file is damaged and unplayable. I tried a couple of mp4 repair tools and was able to recover only half of the file.

When a camcorder battery dies suddenly (perhaps low quality battery), do some camcorder leave behind more recoverable video files, or are they all equally difficult to recover? Does the file format or the media used have any impact?

Sorry to hear hopefully it wasn’t too important.

The short answer MKV is the only format I can think of. The screen capturing software I use defaults to this format instead of mp4 for this very reason.

There is no substitute for a second recording source be that an Atomos or a second camera. For live events I always have a second camera in case of a catastrophic failure.

I know I may be late on replying to this. I did find any video converter good at getting a video file back to play state and would be worth a shot if you still have the video file.

I had one from sony Z5 with MR1 just before covid caused all the trouble it did.

This is a service that is able to recover from icky corrupted professional (and domestic) file formats. You can even preview the missing video content before you commit to having it repaired.

https://aeroquartet.com/

Andrew