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Empty recording after a crash

A drone crash, a dead battery, a card pulled mid-shot — and the clip that should be there shows 0 bytes, or won't open at all, or plays as a few frozen seconds. Before assuming it's gone, it helps to know which of two very different things actually happened.

The camera never wrote a single frame The camera reserves space and writes a header the instant recording starts, before any video data exists. If the crash or power loss happened right at that moment, the file is genuinely empty — there's no frame data to rebuild, because none was ever written. This is the one case that's real data loss, not a recovery problem.

Frames were written, but the index wasn't Far more often, recording had been running for a while — the frames are sitting on the card, byte for byte — and only the final index that tells a player where they are never got written. The file looks exactly as broken as the first case from the outside (won't open, 0:00 duration shown by some players), but the footage is actually there.

How to tell which one it is

File size is the fastest signal: a true empty recording is typically just a few KB (header only). A few hundred MB or more almost always means real frame data is sitting in there, even if nothing plays. Check the clips immediately before and after it on the card too — if those are fine, the interruption likely happened exactly at the edge of this one clip, which fits the second case.

The free preview is the actual answer either way: drop the file in and it either plays or it doesn't, in seconds, before anything is charged.

Check your file — free preview →

See every supported camera and format on the cameras page, or read the FAQ for how the recovery actually works.