Canon TX1 Help...DESPERATE!

peestandingup

Man, am I in a pickle. Long story short, I need some Canon support & they arent giving me the good stuff at all, so I need some ideas on what to do. Here is my original email to Canon Support to explain things:

I'm having an issue with one of the video files from my Powershot TX1. When transferred to my computer, the file says it contains zero data & won't open. I think the problem is that while still filming the movie in question, I accidentally hit the power off button instead of the record button to make it stop recording, so I believe the file didn't get "closed out" by the camera properly.

All the data is there however because the movie plays just fine in-camera & shows the proper file size as well. I even tried to make a small edit in-camera & write a new file from the edited movie, which it did indeed do in full, but that new file still shows zero data when transferred to my computer. When transferring the file to my computer, it does take a bit of time to complete the copy, which again leads me to believe that the data is all there, there is just some error with how the computers are reading the file. I've tried this file on multiple Macs & PCs with the same results.

I'm kinda at a major loss because this movie is very important to me. It's of my daughter being born & thats the kind of thing you don't get to do over. Please forward this to one of your engineers because I'm really all out of options & I'd love if you guys could offer me some solutions. Thanks...Kerry

Seems pretty straight forward right?? Apparently not. Here was their response:

Dear Kerry:

Thank you for writing to us. We value you as a Canon customer and
appreciate the opportunity to assist you with your PowerShot TX1. I am
very sorry you are having trouble downloading your avi files.

You can download movie files and display them in the Browser area just
like ordinary images.

QuickTime 3.0 or later is required to play back movies (Data type: AVI/Compression method: Motion JPEG) on a computer. QuickTime (for Windows) is included on the Canon Digital Camera Solution Disk. On the Macintosh platform, this program is standard with Mac OS X or later.

We hope this information is helpful to you. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance with your PowerShot TX1.

Thank you for choosing Canon.

Sincerely,

James
Technical Support Representative

Arg, I just love those generic copy & paste answers they give to computer illiterate grandmas. Here was my response:

Hi, James. I appreciate the response, but honestly this has nothing to do with my issue whatsoever. I'm actually an Apple technician & have also been using Canon cameras for many years now, so I'm familiar with the file format these cameras produce & the programs used to play them. So, I'm not a novice by any means.

Please re-read my original email. If you're not able to give me some real solutions, please forward the issue to a higher tiered technician. This is a difficult problem & may require that. Thanks so much...Kerry

So thats it, guys. Haven't heard anything since. If anyone out there knows any solutions to this, I would REALLY appreciate it. At the very least I would love to be able to contact someone directly at Canon who is more knowledgeable about this sorta thing rather than have to wade through tier & tier of their support, which apparently doesnt care anyway since I havent heard back from them.

The only thing I can think of doing is purchasing the component video out cable from Canon & somehow re-capturing the video as it plays from inside the camera. But that would require some expensive hardware probably. It would also degrade the quality.

Thanks!

ziggy53

peestandingup wrote:

...

The only thing I can think of doing is purchasing the component video out cable from Canon & somehow re-capturing the video as it plays from inside the camera. But that would require some expensive hardware probably. It would also degrade the quality.

Thanks!

Yes, that will work. If you connect the camera to a DV camcorder you can create a DV tape and ultimately transfer the DV file into a computer with IEEE 488 (firewire) ports. (Some camcorders also allow "pass through" so you can use the camcorder to digitize and transfer into the computer without recording to tape first.)

Quality is suprisingly good and the DV file is completely editable etc.

cmason

Can you take the SD card out and read it directly from the computer?

peestandingup

ziggy53 wrote:

Yes, that will work. If you connect the camera to a DV camcorder you can create a DV tape and ultimately transfer the DV file into a computer with IEEE 488 (firewire) ports. (Some camcorders also allow "pass through" so you can use the camcorder to digitize and transfer into the computer without recording to tape first.)

Quality is suprisingly good and the DV file is completely editable etc.

I was under the impression that all those miniDV camcorders only have composite inputs (single yellow connector), not component. Which is fine if thats all I can get, but I'd like to retain as much quality as possible. Do any have component inputs that can retain all 1280 x 720 worth of pixels when dumping back to an internal storage??

As far as standard def, I can use this & this. I've even thought about using this Slingbox model, which has HD component inputs & then it displays on your Mac/PC in really good quality. But, the problem is Slingbox doesnt allow the stream to be recorded. But I've got a screen capture app called iShowU that does a really good job of making a movie outta whatever is on your screen. That may be too much degradation though.

What do you guys think would be best??

cmason wrote:

Can you take the SD card out and read it directly from the computer?

Yes, it reads just fine & the file in question transfers too, taking some time to move the file over. So, that tells me that the data is there, but the computers are fooled into thinking there is no data.