File corruption
Also known as: data corruption, damaged file
Damage to the data itself rather than to the picture it describes, which video is unusually prone to because the files are large.
Updated
What it means
Corruption is a byte-level problem. The bits that describe a frame are wrong or missing, and the player either refuses the file or produces something that was never recorded in the first place.
It is a different failure from a damaged picture. Corrupted frames are what corruption looks like when a player struggles on anyway; the corruption itself sits underneath that.
Video is exposed to it more than most data. Long writes to a card in the cold, in the wet or on a battery about to die give it plenty of opportunities to go wrong at the worst moment.
How it works in practice
Verification is the only reliable detection. A Checksum mismatch on an offload catches damage introduced in transit, which is the category most people never look for at all until it is too late.
Repair is frequently possible. A Video file repair pass rebuilds the index of a recording that was never finalised, which recovers most clips that appear to be lost entirely.
Copies are the real defence. Two independent copies of a card make corruption an inconvenience, and one copy makes it a lost session with nothing at all to fall back on afterwards.
What to watch out for
It hides until the worst moment. A damaged clip plays for twenty seconds and then stops, and the discovery usually happens during an edit rather than during a review of the card.
Exports inherit it. A timeline containing one damaged clip can produce a Transcode failure at the end of a long render, with nothing in the message naming the clip responsible for it.
Cheap cards are the usual source. A counterfeit or worn card reports a size it does not have, and a recording that exceeds the real capacity is corrupt by construction rather than by accident.
How RawClip handles it
Damaged files are detected rather than analysed blindly, and the readable part of a clip is used where there is one. A file that cannot be read at all is reported instead of being dropped from the result without a word.