Canon TX1 Help...DESPERATE!

[peestandingup]

Man, am I in a pickle. Long story short, I need some Canon support & they arent giving me the good stuff at all, so I need some ideas on what to do. Here is my original email to Canon Support to explain things:

I'm having an issue with one of the video files from my Powershot TX1. When transferred to my computer, the file says it contains zero data & won't open. I think the problem is that while still filming the movie in question, I accidentally hit the power off button instead of the record button to make it stop recording, so I believe the file didn't get "closed out" by the camera properly.

All the data is there however because the movie plays just fine in-camera & shows the proper file size as well. I even tried to make a small edit in-camera & write a new file from the edited movie, which it did indeed do in full, but that new file still shows zero data when transferred to my computer. When transferring the file to my computer, it does take a bit of time to complete the copy, which again leads me to believe that the data is all there, there is just some error with how the computers are reading the file. I've tried this file on multiple Macs & PCs with the same results.

I'm kinda at a major loss because this movie is very important to me. It's of my daughter being born & thats the kind of thing you don't get to do over. Please forward this to one of your engineers because I'm really all out of options & I'd love if you guys could offer me some solutions. Thanks...Kerry

Seems pretty straight forward right?? Apparently not. Here was their response:

Dear Kerry:

Thank you for writing to us. We value you as a Canon customer and
appreciate the opportunity to assist you with your PowerShot TX1. I am
very sorry you are having trouble downloading your avi files.

You can download movie files and display them in the Browser area just
like ordinary images.

QuickTime 3.0 or later is required to play back movies (Data type: AVI/Compression method: Motion JPEG) on a computer. QuickTime (for Windows) is included on the Canon Digital Camera Solution Disk. On the Macintosh platform, this program is standard with Mac OS X or later.

We hope this information is helpful to you. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance with your PowerShot TX1.

Thank you for choosing Canon.

Sincerely,

James
Technical Support Representative

Arg, I just love those generic copy & paste answers they give to computer illiterate grandmas. Here was my response:

Hi, James. I appreciate the response, but honestly this has nothing to do with my issue whatsoever. I'm actually an Apple technician & have also been using Canon cameras for many years now, so I'm familiar with the file format these cameras produce & the programs used to play them. So, I'm not a novice by any means.

Please re-read my original email. If you're not able to give me some real solutions, please forward the issue to a higher tiered technician. This is a difficult problem & may require that. Thanks so much...Kerry

So thats it, guys. Haven't heard anything since. If anyone out there knows any solutions to this, I would REALLY appreciate it. At the very least I would love to be able to contact someone directly at Canon who is more knowledgeable about this sorta thing rather than have to wade through tier & tier of their support, which apparently doesnt care anyway since I havent heard back from them.

The only thing I can think of doing is purchasing the component video out cable from Canon & somehow re-capturing the video as it plays from inside the camera. But that would require some expensive hardware probably. It would also degrade the quality.

Thanks!

[CRE@TE]

Does the file show the proper file extension? Try renaming the file extension if it is not the proper type for the file. (Just a thought)

[peestandingup]

Does the file show the proper file extension? Try renaming the file extension if it is not the proper type for the file. (Just a thought)
Yeah, the file extension is named properly.

[Jon]

From the sound of it, you'd need to go in at the byte level to "close" the file so it looks right to a computer. The camera's more forgiving of data errors in a file it created (and less so in files from outside) than a computer, which needs the full official header info for he file type. And I wouldn't expect anyone at Canon other than the software engineers who actually wrote the code to understand the necessary actions to repair it. Your best bet is going to be to study, carefully, the MotionJPEG spec and disassemble your header to see what might be missing. I suspect you'll find that M-JPEG files have a length value coded in that (obviously) can't be written until the file's complete, and you'll need to duplicate that. One thing people have found helpful in similar (not identical; I haven't heard of this particular problem before) situations is to shoot a file of the same length for test/evaluation purposes.

I will note that you seem to have given us much more information than you did Canon, based on the quotes you provided us. Perhaps if you'd started out with the excruciating details you might not have received that particular stock reply.

[WT21]

Just a thought -- There are a couple of parts to a "movie"

One is the video footage, another is the audio, and the third is the container or wrapper. On a TX1, the video is shot in MJPEG (nor sure of the audio, maybe WAV?) And the container or wrapper is the .avi shell.

The video and audio might be fine, with the avi the issue.

Keep a copy of the files on the SD card, but bring a copy onto a computer. Use some kind of viewer where you can extract the audio or video streams separately. Now, this is where my advice for you might fall down. I'm guessing you use PC, while I use Mac. Personally, I'd try to see if I could open this in Quicktime Pro on my Mac. QTPro lets me see the streams inside a wrapper, and extract them independently. It's possible that QTPro might not even load the file, but there may be other programs on the PC that would allow you to open up the AVI file, and "save as" the audio/video into a different format/file. Based on what you are saying, it really sounds like its the AVI wrapper that's corrupt, not the video or audio source.

You might also want to find a forum board on video, and see if there is more intelligent help than what I'm offering in this post.

Good luck. I hope you can save it.

[puttycat]

If the movie will play, you could play the video,then capture it on your computer in real time. If the camera has a digital output there shouldn't be any lose in IQ. After you get the file saved then play around with the original. I would also try a card reader/writer to get the data off of the card.

[peestandingup]

Eureka!! I got the video. I got to thinking about Jon's comment about how the camera software is more forgiving than a computer running another OS. So I thought, "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I installed Canon's proprietary software to my Mac & tried to extract the video with that?" So, I ran the installer for the ImageBrowser app & fired up the TX1. The software saw it & downloaded it right to my computer. I guess the manufacturers software is good for something after all. :D

So, apparently Canon's software re-encodes the video as it comes off the memory card for some reason instead of just directly moving it from camera to computer, or at least thats what it seemed to be doing. I dont know why they elected to do it that way (maybe because of this very issue & the chance of file errors), but thank God they did.

Thanks to everyone!

[taylorwilsdon]

Eureka!! I got the video. I got to thinking about Jon's comment about how the camera software is more forgiving than a computer running another OS. So I thought, "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I installed Canon's proprietary software to my Mac & tried to extract the video with that?" So, I ran the installer for the ImageBrowser app & fired up the TX1. The software saw it & downloaded it right to my computer. I guess the manufacturers software is good for something after all. :D

Thanks to everyone!

That means that the answer you were so quick to dismiss was right (albeit canned)

"You can download movie files and display them in the Browser area just
like ordinary images."

;)

[peestandingup]

That means that the answer you were so quick to dismiss was right (albeit canned)

"You can download movie files and display them in the Browser area just
like ordinary images."

;)
Yeah, that is technically true. I wonder if he knew that though?? He didnt explain why or how, or even that he understood what I was even talking about. Im not above giving credit to the guy or even sending him an email thanking him. Im just not sure he knew. Especially since he didn't email me back.