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This page was written a few years ago

Some information needs to be updated, we will do it soon.

Please accept our apologies for not having up-to-date information about this topic.

Nevertheless, we keep offering repair services for this type of damaged footage — with same level of quality as ever — and we will continue to do so in the future.

Feel free to tell us about the content you would like to see in the revised page, using the feedback widget at the end of the page.

This is a list of tools that can be useful to repair movies.
None of them will do miracles: Repair is a very specialized task. Having a hammer doesn't make you a good carpenter.

But carpenters need good hammers!

Synalyze It!

An hex editor with grammar-based parsing built-in.

Synalyze It! is a very powerful tool to reverse-engineer or examine the content of a file. For Windows and Linux users, this utility is called Hexinator.

It not just displays the content of a file in hexadecimal form, but also analyzes it through the lens of a “grammar”, that specifies the syntax of the content of the file.

Starting with a plain hex view, as you identify structures and data inside them and code their syntax into the grammar, Synalyze It! “colorizes” the hex code and makes it readable.

Below, the first page of a R3D file reveals the video properties and its metadata when the grammar is applied.

You can write our own grammars, to visualize specific data structures and perform specialized tasks on them.

With support for scripting and integration with external programs, Synalyze It! can do almost anything, like parsing entire movies or even repairing videos.

At Aero Quartet, our technicians use Synalyze It! on damaged videos to visualize metadata, to parse them, and to prototype some repair algorithms.

However, we don't use it in the Repair Kits, which must be fast, robust and standalone apps.

Hex Fiend

http://www.ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/

A free, open source hexadecimal editor for Mac OS X.
In-house, we use a modified version optimized for video and audio structures parsing.

This program is very good at modifying, splitting, rearranging and constructing binary files.
A Swiss-army knife for binary, if you will.

Atom Inspector

Displays the QuickTime atoms found inside a MOV or a MP4 file as a tree structure and allows to perform small changes.

Freely available for Mac OS X, but this is an old program by Apple, nowadays hard to find.
Last macOS version where it works is 10.14 Mojave.

Dumpster

Displays the structure of a QuickTime movie as an atoms tree, and allows to perform small changes.

Freely available for Mac OS X, but this is an ancient program by Apple, nowadays hard to find, and that only runs on 32 bit mode.
Last macOS version where it works is 10.14 Mojave.

xxd

A command line hex editor for Mac OS X.
Can display files contents and also apply patches to file.

xxd -s 0x30 -l 0x100 original.mov

0000030: 2000 0004 0813 1008 51fa 1000 a600 edff .......Q........
0000040: f5ff d800 7fff 4213 0809 81f8 c1ff 8000 ......B.........
0000050: 0000 2204 53b8 881e af73 4da6 4621 0c0c ..".S....sM.F!..
0000060: f240 9e53 1348 1521 8310 e524 546c 2a65 .@.S.H.!...$Tl*e
0000070: d4a1 34aa 5130 4039 4206 1295 240c 252a ..4.Q0@9B...$.%*
0000080: 481d 8e38 98a5 0868 6128 40d3 64c1 034d H..8...ha(@.d..M
0000090: 8a85 84a7 1b04 151c 6c40 34a9 4c10 5429 ........l@4.L.T)
00000a0: 4c48 2a14 a624 150a 5314 c252 a10c 094a LH*..$..S..R...J
00000b0: 9207 752a 3000 1ca9 5284 98c9 4a92 0026 ..u*0...R...J..&
00000c0: ef04 370a ba83 12a2 5080 1054 71b0 02a3 ..7.....P..Tq...
00000d0: 8c49 d811 8054 1800 7ac6 09a4 558c 1348 .I...T..z...U..H
00000e0: ab18 2691 5630 4e64 a836 965d 3982 0a85 ..&.V0Nd.6.]9...
00000f0: 2982 0a85 2982 0a85 2982 0a85 240c 1052 )...)...)...$..R
0000100: 9820 a852 9820 a852 9820 a852 984c 2611 . .R. .R. .R.L&.
0000110: d5b7 1d59 5750 6254 4a10 04c2 5084 93ba ...YWPbTJ...P...
0000120: 8c6a 9150 62a1 64a8 3686 9156 304d 22ac .j.Pb.d.6..V0M".