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Hi PhotoRec Community!

I lost some very important drone footage somehow, and am trying to use PhotoRec to recover it. When I follow the steps for finding lost videos off of an SD card, I get the thumbnail for each lost video and then an unplayable mp4. The instructions said I should expect files with names like _ftyp.mov and _mdat.mov, but all I see are "f6623054.mp4". In other words, I see an "f" and then some numbers (different for every video) and then .mp4. Does anyone know why this might be happening? The video files themselves are the sizes I'd expect them to be, so it seems like the data is in there somewhere. Thanks so much for the help!

By design Photorec is finding files based upon fingerprints supposing all metadata is lost. It only uses usable metada from within a file.
Therefore file names and direcotries (both metadata) cannot be restored.

As for the relationship between mov and mp4 please read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_File_Format

Hi recuperation,

Thank you for the response! Clearly I don't know much about this so I really appreciate it. Does that mean if I somehow convert the files from .mp4 to .mov they would be functional again? Is there a good way to do this? Thank you for the help!

You would just rename the file extension from mp4 to mov.

Unfortunately that didn't fix the problem. Any other ideas? I really appreciate the help.

If the files recovered by Photorec cannot be opened/used/played then the recovery failed.
The reason is defragmentation. Other recovery software which tries to evaluate remaining parts of metadata might perform better.
Software that only uses fingerprinting like Photorec will fail as well.