Repair a recording that was cut off

When an Insta360 camera loses power or crashes while recording, the file holds the picture and sound but not the index a player needs, so nothing can open it. Two Left Wheels 360 recognises such recordings and repairs them into a new copy. The original is never changed.

Compared with Insta360 File Repair

• It repairs recordings File Repair cannot.
• Nothing to run by hand. Every recording is checked as you add it, and an editing pack is checked when you open it; you find out a recording is damaged before you start editing, not when it fails to import.
• All damaged recordings at once. One window lists every damaged recording, and one click repairs them all.
• No reference to hunt for. It finds a healthy recording from the same camera beside the damaged one and makes sure it fits; you choose one only when none does.
• You know the result before you repair. Each line says how much a repair keeps and whether the sound comes back.
• Every repaired copy is checked before it goes into your editing pack, and a repair that fails leaves nothing behind.
• Right where you open files. The TLW 360 viewer offers the repair when a recording will not play.

When you add recordings

Every Insta360 recording is checked as it is added, all of them in one pass; the check reads only the start and end of each file, so it takes a moment. Healthy recordings are added as usual. Damaged ones are not added; the Damaged recordings window lists them, one line each:

• Interrupted, with what a repair keeps, for example "A repair keeps 12:34, with sound", and ticked for repair.
• Interrupted with no reference: the repair borrows the camera's settings from a healthy recording of the same camera made with the same video settings, and looks for one in the same folder. When none there fits, click Choose reference… and pick one; the line then shows what a repair keeps.
• Empty file or Stopped at once: the camera stopped before it recorded a picture, so there is nothing to recover.

Click Repair selected. Each repaired copy is a new file beside its original, named after it with -repaired before the extension, and goes into the editing pack. When there is no room beside an original, Two Left Wheels 360 asks for another folder. An editing pack opened with a damaged recording in it is checked too, and its repaired copies replace the damaged ones.

In the TLW 360 viewer

Open a damaged recording in the viewer, for example with Shift+Space in File Explorer: it says the recording was cut off and how much a repair keeps, and Repair it now? makes the copy and opens it.

What a repaired recording can do

It plays, and you edit it like any other recording. It carries the camera's details again, with its own recording time and length, so Insta360 Studio opens and stitches it too, and it gets its own thumbnail, made from its first frames. It cannot be stabilized: the camera writes its gyroscope data only when it stops recording, at the end of the file, so a recording cut off before that never had it, and no repair can bring it back. DJI recordings are not repaired.