Occasionally when using ClipWrap, you’ll run into a file that will fail to convert and will instead display an “err parsing file” message. We’ve found that these errors are almost always due to one of two things.
The first cause is a bad SD card. SD cards have a finite lifespan and aren’t impervious to abuse in rough environments. As they start to fail, they’ll have bad sectors which prevent reading or writing. Very often, these are cases of “silent corruption” – you don’t know anything has gone wrong until you’re trying to convert the file. When we open these files and look at the raw data, we find them full of junk data or zeros, not video.
The other cause is a bad SD card reader or a bad transfer. Sometimes simply copying the files off the card again using a different reader is enough to allow them to convert.
In either case, we’ve got a new mode beginning with ClipWrap 2.6 which attempts to work around this corruption. If you hold the “option” key while clicking the “Convert” button, you’ll see the button text change to read “Force Convert.” This will make ClipWrap try to convert what it can from the file, even in the case of corruption.
If the file is simply full of zeros or junk data, no amount of clever code can bring back the video. But, if there’s just a small corrupt segment (sometimes as small as a few hundred bytes), the “Force Convert” mode may be able to recover large amounts of your content. Be sure you check the resulting file, as damaged files can have sync issues, dropouts, or other glitches.