So I asked my friend — and fellow Rover — to record the wedding on his camcorder, a Samsung SC-DC164 DVD camcorder. And he did exactly that, and also recorded quite a lot of the reception as well. I’m thankful that he did, because its nice to see those memories played out on the screen again.

There’s just one problem.

Something happened to the first disc, and as a result it wasn’t finalized. What finalization does, in DVD camcorder parlance, is “closes off” the disc and readies it for playback in a home DVD player or computer DVD-ROM drive. It’s a common step to omit when one is filming something like a wedding — you should theoretically just be able to swap a disc out after it fills up and finish recording the event, and then go back later and finalize all the discs you used and be done with it.

That’s not what happened with the wedding video, unfortunately — something went wrong, and the unfinalized disc, while quite obviously full of data, doesn’t recognize more than the first 10 minutes of footage as being present when played back in the DVD camcorder used for the recording.

That’s bad.

What’s worse, of course, is that the disc isn’t finalized — that makes it unreadable in most DVD-ROM drives, which means that even manually extracting the data isn’t feasible.

Or is it?

Enter ISO Buster.

This handy utility is saving my butt. Not only does it enable my work PC to read the contents of the DVD, but it has actually found and extracted most of the lost video segments. There’s about…well, I would guess there’s another 10 minutes of footage that I have to recover, some of which could theoretically be left if it had to be. Some of it absolutely needs to be pulled off the disc if at all possible…although at least I was able to recover the exchange of the rings (the vows will hopefully be recovered in the last two files I have to pull off the disc).

I’m not out of the woods just yet as far as getting this video back is concerned, but I just wanted to stop and mention, in brief, a handy utility for salvaging data off of corrupted and damaged DVDs. Not exactly the sort of thing everyone has a pressing need for…but hey, if it helps someone out of dire straits, it’s worth mentioning on that possibility alone.

Still, this is going to be a lesson for me. Next time I need to tape anything, I’ll go and buy one of these.