Field notes
The battery went mid‑take, the card came out, or the camcorder now says the image database file is damaged and shows you nothing at all. Those are two different problems with two different answers. Here is what to try, in the order that costs you least.
Do not record anything else on that card. Take it out and copy everything off it before you try anything, this page included. Nothing recovers footage that has been written over.
A Sony camcorder keeps a catalogue of what is on the card, stored separately from the recordings themselves. When that catalogue is damaged the camera stops listing your footage and offers to build a fresh one, which looks exactly like losing everything. It usually is not. Sony's own guide to that warning says of the recordings themselves: Image files are not damaged.
Copy the card before you answer the prompt. The message reads The Image Database File is damaged. Do you want to create a new file?, and creating new information is the step that leaves the earlier recordings unreachable from the camera. Sony's guide is explicit that once new information exists, the old recorded images on the media cannot be played back.
Pull the card, copy it whole to your Mac, and only then let the camera tidy itself up.
The repair is a menu item rather than a service job. On a Handycam it is [Setup] › [Media Settings] › [Repair Img. DB F.], then choose the recording medium. Sony documents it for the FDR‑AX100, FDR‑AX100E, HDR‑CX900 and HDR‑CX900E and for the Handycam range generally. It is also the fix when clips you copied back onto a card refuse to appear in Event View.
Sony does not leave recordings where you would look for them, so a card that appears empty in the Finder usually is not. Which folder depends on the format you shot:
PRIVATE › M4ROOT › CLIP
and are ordinary .MP4 files, named in sequence from C0001.MP4.PRIVATE › AVCHD › BDMV › STREAM
as .MTS files.
Copy the whole PRIVATE folder rather than picking files out of it. The
material around the clips is what a camera and an editor use to make sense of them,
and it costs nothing to keep.
If the file that will not open is a sensible size rather than a few kilobytes, the video is almost certainly still inside it. What a camera writes last, when a recording stops cleanly, is the index saying where every frame lives. Lose power before that and you have a complete recording with no map, which every player refuses to touch.
On a Mac, this tells you which case you are in:
ls -l C0001.MP4 strings -t d C0001.MP4 | grep -m 5 -E 'ftyp|mdat|moov'
ftyp and mdat present but no moov is the good
outcome: the footage is there and only the index is missing.
The detail of what that means. A file of a few
kilobytes means the footage was never written, and card level recovery software is the
only remaining route.
This runs in your browser. The file is not uploaded, and only the first and last megabyte are read, which is where the markers that decide the answer live. Works on any computer, including Windows, even though the app itself is Mac only.
This checker has its own page at cinesalve.honorboxx.workers.dev/check, easier to pass to someone else who needs it.
The index cannot be copied from another clip. It holds the exact byte position and size of every frame in your recording, so it has to be reconstructed by reading the raw footage and working out where each frame begins, using a healthy clip from the same camera to learn how that body writes.
untrunc is free and open source and does exactly this, if you are willing to compile a command line tool and hand it a reference file. Try it before paying anybody. If it will not build on your Mac, these are the errors and what they mean.
No other clip from that camera? Record one now, before the card goes anywhere. A few seconds in the same mode and the same resolution is enough. A damaged Sony file does not state its own codec settings: XAVC S keeps them in the header the camera never got to write, so they have to be read from a working recording, which is why every tool that can do this asks for one.
A Mac app that does the same job. Drop in the file that will not open plus any clip from the same camera that does, and it rebuilds the index so the file plays again. Nothing is uploaded; it runs entirely on your Mac. $69 once.
It is measured against a real Sony FDR‑AX100E recording, 4K at 25fps, camera original and cut mid‑take. Every recovered frame is compared against the original by byte position and size:
| Real Sony footage | Frames recovered | Exact | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sony FDR-AX100E, 2160p 25fps, cut mid‑take | 1488 / 1488 | 100% | its own full recording |
Every frame lands at the exact offset and size the camera wrote. That last column is there because one camera original AX100 clip is published anywhere to test against, so the measurement pairs the damaged file with its own untruncated self rather than with a separate take. This camera records uncompressed sound rather than the compressed kind, interleaved between the pictures alongside a timecode track, and the picture is what is reassembled today: the recovered file is silent. Other Sony bodies have not been through the suite, and a clip from one is genuinely welcome.
A damaged Sony clip is genuinely useful: it goes into the test suite and the fix ships for everyone. Second clips from an AX100 are especially wanted, and so is anything from an A7, an FX or a ZV body. cinesalve@proton.me (or the contact form), with the body and the recording mode. You will get an honest answer about whether it can be recovered, including when the answer is no, and there is no pitch attached.