GoPro File “could not be opened.”

Our good friend Rob Parker couldn’t have had better timing on writing us about this…
Last week we spent some time with Philip Bloom in Palm Springs. It was great. We got to relax by the pool and play with our new Sony TX5, GoPro, and Phil’s Camarush Eggtimer.   When we got back home and sat down to edit it all together, we noticed something odd:

And sure enough we got the dreaded error message “The document “M4H00478.MP4” could not be opened. The movie is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.” Oh no!! Jon had warned me about this but I hadn’t experienced it yet but now it has happened.

Rob Parker sent us some great info on fixing this little problem:

“Treasured is a free tool from Aero Quartet that scans your defective file and tells you what it finds. After running the free scan, I was thrilled to see full-resolution screen grabs from the video and a proclamation that my video was 99 percent recoverable!

I followed the prompts to initiate the recovery process. Treasured asked me to upload a small sample clip that had been shot at the same settings so that it could match those settings to the damaged file.

I got a confirmation that my fix was underway and that it would cost $79. It was well worth it for me since this was a professional job and I needed to save face here.

After several hours I was emailed a download link for a free repair tool. I was to open the damaged movie with the repair tool and wait while it worked its magic. I was soon presented with a repaired video that looked to be prefect except for a bit of intentional artifacts that the tool introduces into the video.

You inspect the video, make sure it’s what you want, and then pay for a key to unlock the repair tool. In my case, the fee was US$79. Then you run the repair sequence again with the unlocked version of the repair tool and this time the video is pristine.”

Make sure to read the rest of his post and see some screen grabs on his site.

Thanks Rob!