Hello everyone,

This is my first post on this forum. I’m panicking a bit at the moment.

I’m a journalist who started working with the Osmo Action 4 just over a week ago. Today, I went into a slum area in the city of Manila, Philippines. I had the opportunity to film some exclusive interviews in that area.

I used the Action 4 with a Sandisk Ultra 512GB A1 Series. After reading several posts, I learned that this is not the right card to shoot video in 4K 50FPS because the speed of the SD card is too slow. My (BIG) mistake – I will buy new SD cards that are suitable for the job.

My question is about something else. I recorded a total of about 250GB of video on the abovementioned SD card. At a certain point, the following well-known notification popped up on the screen:

'SD card speed slow. Shooting may stop'

During recording in the slum area I kept checking whether the camera was still recording. It did. After recording the first half hour I had to be sure, so I transferred the first part of the video files to my Macbook and checked the quality. Everything looked perfect, so I continued recording further, despite the notification.

I got back to my hotel and started watching all the footage I recorded todat. After the first 11 clips (which is about 55GB), VLC Player suddenly stops. I went to the playlist of VLC and saw to my surprise that all remaining clips had a length of 0:00 and were not playable on any other media player.

I took a look at the files on my SD card. All 250GB of data were on it. But after the first 11 clips, the .MP4 files showed no thumbnail. I tried several free photo and video recovery programs. No luck playing the files after recovering.

My question is:

Is there a way to recover the 29 “corrupted” .MP4 files? Or are they definitely lost?

Are the corresponding .LRF files of any use (even if they are of way worse quality)?

Any help and advice is much appreciated!

Hi there. Thank you for your inquiry and we do apologize if you are having issues right now. Kindly please check the following to possibly recover your files:
Try to recover the files using CMD:

a. Insert the SD card with a card reader into a computer.

b. Go to the Start menu and enter “cmd” in the search column. Press Enter and you can find “cmd.exe” in the program listing.

c. Click “cmd.exe” and you can see the command window below, which allows you to restore the damaged SD card without reformatting.

d. Enter chkdsk f: /f

For example: “chkdsk [space] f: [space]/f” Notes: Between two [spaces] is the drive of the damaged SD card.

Upon completion, check whether the SD card is recovered.

You may also Scan and restore the SD card

In My Computer, right-click on the damaged SD card disk. Open the Properties and Tools:
Select Debugging - Start Checking. Check A&N, then click Start.

Please note that the methods above cannot guarantee that all data can be recovered. If the data still can't be recovered, please choose a professional third party for data recovery. Thank you.