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MDT Repair Tool

Your camera died mid-take. The footage is still there.

When a Panasonic LUMIX loses power while recording, it leaves behind a .MDT file that nothing will play. Every frame you shot is inside it — what's missing is the index the camera writes when you press stop. This rebuilds that index and hands you back a normal clip.

Free Mac, Windows & Linux Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc Your footage never leaves your computer

Repair a file

Copy the .MDT off the card first and work on the copy — never repair straight from the card.

Best in Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc on Mac, Windows or Linux, where the repaired file is written straight to disk at any size. Safari and Firefox can't do that yet, so they're limited to about 2 GB.

Add both files to begin.

By using this tool you accept that it's provided free and as-is, with no guarantee it can recover every file. It only ever reads your .MDT and never changes it, but always work on a copy and keep your original. You use it at your own risk, and We Are One Apps accepts no responsibility for lost or damaged footage.

What this actually does

An MP4 or MOV is two things: the picture and sound themselves, and an index saying where every frame begins. The camera writes the footage as it records, and the index only when you stop. Pull the battery and you get the first without the second — which is your .MDT file.

It reads your frames, not a guess

Inside the file every chunk of video is stamped with its own length, so the frames can be stepped through exactly rather than hunted for. Nothing is re-encoded and not one byte of picture is altered — the repaired file is your original footage with a new table of contents.

Why it needs a second clip

Some things simply aren't in the .MDT: the frame rate, the colour settings, how the sound is stored. A clip the camera finished writing properly carries all of that, so one is borrowed from there. It must be the same camera and the same recording mode. Panasonic's instructions ask for a reference clip of about one second; this one takes a clip of any length.

Frame order is measured, not copied

Long-GOP recordings store frames out of order, and how far out varies shot by shot. Rather than copy a pattern from the reference clip and hope, each frame's intended position is read from the frame itself — so the rebuilt clip plays in the order it was shot.

Before you start

Copy the card first

Work on a copy on your computer. Repairing from the card risks the one copy you have left, and cards are slow.

Match the recording mode

The reference clip needs the same resolution, frame rate and codec as the broken take. If you still have the camera, set it back to that mode and shoot a couple of seconds.

Sound must be LPCM

Same limit as Panasonic's own tool: recordings with AAC audio can't be rebuilt. Video-only files are fine.

Questions

Is my footage uploaded anywhere?

No. There is no server involved in the repair at all. The page reads the file straight from your disk and writes the repaired copy back to your disk. Your footage is never sent anywhere — you could disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the repair would still work.

The only thing the page sends is an anonymous count: that it was visited, the name of the site you came from, and whether a repair worked. No cookies, no file names, nothing from your files.

That is also why it can handle a 100 GB file: there is nothing to upload.

Which browser should I use?

Chrome, Edge, Brave or Arc, on any of Mac, Windows or Linux. Those can stream the repaired file straight to disk, so file size is limited only by your free space.

Safari and Firefox don't yet support that, so there the repaired file has to be held in memory first — fine for a few gigabytes, not for a 60 GB take. The page will tell you which you're in.

What can't it fix?

Recordings with AAC audio, and AVCHD. Both are out of reach for Panasonic's tool too.

If the card itself is failing, or the file was only partly copied off it, no index can help — the frames have to actually be there. And whatever was being written at the instant the power went is always lost: that's usually a fraction of a second, and you'll be told exactly how much.

Will the repaired file open in Premiere or Resolve?

Yes — it's an ordinary MOV. The picture and sound are untouched, so it grades exactly as the rest of your footage does.

One thing to know, and it's true of Panasonic's tool as well: the camera's own metadata and timecode don't survive, because they lived in the part that was never written.

Does it work on cameras other than LUMIX?

Probably, though it's built and tested around what LUMIX writes. Any H.264 or HEVC recording that lost its index can be rebuilt the same way, given a matching reference clip. There's no harm in trying: the damaged file is only ever read, never modified.

It found fewer frames than I expected

Nearly always a reference clip from a different recording mode. Check its resolution, frame rate and codec against what the broken take was shot in, and try again with a closer match.

If it stops very early, the .MDT may not have copied off the card completely.

While you're here

Small, sharp tools for people who make things. Most of them started as something I needed for my own wedding films business and got tidied up enough to share.