Quicktime killed my AVCHD file

I just had the same problem happen with my Sony DSC RX100. I tried to share a video to YouTube and quit the application after it got hung up. I don't understand how such an action could result in my videos getting deleted. This is a huge problem for me now and I'm hoping that by adding to the thread it will somehow save others from the same fate.

I have a Sony DSC-HX50V photo camera. The system I have been using for video storage is this AVCHD thing, which consists of a big file storing all the videos.

Using Quicktime under Mac OS 10.9.2, it killed it. Let me explain. I was bored of having to export a video I would like to share on youtube and then uploading it there, so I tried to use the option "export to youtube". It didn't work, apparently it didn't like the format. Ok, so I tried to export that specific video to a standalone .mov as I had been doing. It wasn't keen on that either, and I decided to quit quicktime. It was frozen, and I forced quit.

When I go open the huge AVCHD file again, it had shrunk from ~12gb to 88 mb, and it wasn't recognized as a video file. A lot of free space appeared on my SD card.

I put the card in the camera to see if it would somehow magically recover the file. It detected there was something corrupt, and it "fixed" it, which means it threw the corrupted file into a backup folder and created a new, empty, avchd file.

Is there any way I can get my videos back? I don't have a backup for them, I would hate to have lost them all in such a silly way.

1) It sounds as if you managed to find a workflow that overrides the software programming that normally prevents users from writing data back to the source file which it is being read.

2) You never abort a write operation uless you can afford to lose the data being written. (I.e., QT normally writes Program Stream files rather than Transport Stream files and aborting a file before it "closes" the file properly usually makes the file unreadable.)

3) The normal way to edit and share camcorder content is to copy/capture the raw data to an archival drive for processing and to never delete the source data until the archival operation is confirmed. (I personally use a 30 TB RAID unit divided into 2 protected 12 TB volumes and transfer files to a smaller, secondary Thunderbolt RAID unit for realtime processing as needed to prevent possibilities such as you describe.)

4) It is unclear what you mean by "fixed" here. If the storage SD files are in fact wiped/deleted, free space was reallocated, and a new "empty" file is all you have, then your chances for recovering useable data are probably slim to none.

We spend thousands of dollars in Apple hardware and software. It is not funny to lose a serie of videos because Quicktime fails to handle it.

The least you can do is to provide help and solutions.

This is a user-to-user forum. If you wish to formally bring this issue to Apple's attention, please use the appropriate "Product Feedback" form to provide a step-by-step description of the problem and your workflow: http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Jon's response isn't very helpful but I guess it gave him the opportunity to brag about his 30 TB RAID.

Yes, data should always be backed up; however, humans aren't perfect and clicking a "share" button shouldn't delete your frickin' content.

For anyone interested in a possible solution, I was able to recover my data by spending $20 on "Picture Rescue 2". The files that were recovered appeared with the ".mts" extension instead showing up as an AVCHD collection.

Picture Rescue 2: https://www.prosofteng.com/products/picture-rescue-2.php

Thank you for posting this! The same thing happened to me! Except I don't have the card anymore so it's just on my MAC. Do you think this software can recover the files also from my Mac and not the SD card?? I still feel like there must be a way to make MAC re-recognise these files. It can't be that it just deletes them!

I am having the same issue. My AVCHD/BDMV file was converted to a data format while attempting to share via email. How do i get or convert my file back to a media format so i actually SEE my video clip and not scrambled letters? HELP!