Recovering lost imovie archives

Ok so im new to the forum but I have a crisis. A few days ago I accidently formatted a disk on my windows computer that had some 1080p hd footage that I shot in the form of imovie archives. At first I didnt know what to do. the disk had been previously used for time machine and so was formatted accordingly in the mac format. I formatted it accidently into an ntfs disk. I recovered the files using recuva. the problem is that all the videos were mov files. made sense. but I couldnt open the majority of them. the ones I could open had the audio intact but the video looked choppy and not in hd.

so I assume the other mov files that I couldnt open were all part of the archive. so my question is if I can recover the archives completely without damaged video. the drive is still in ntfs and is still connected to my windows computer and I copied all the video to another drive to look at it on my mac. Please help. its very important footage.

Recovering the video data depends on whether or not it's intact. When a disk is formatted to NTFS, meta data is created along with a Master File Table. Both take up quite a bit of space depending on how large the drive is. Some of your data may have been overwritten by them.

You said you tried "Recuva". There are many free undelete and file recovery programs for Windows. Do some Googling and find one that works best. Here's a LINK to get you started.

Regards.

yes but the problem is recovering the imovie archive so it can imported into imovie. and I can look for software forever but the problem is finding one that will get good results. recuva just didnt do a good enough job.

I understand your dilemma. What I'm saying is that you'll just have to try other recovery software to see if they'll give you better results. Chances of recovering the archives intact without file damage is slim as per what I wrote you in my first reply.

Regards.

First, disconnect the drive from the Windows box. Second, expect the worse.

I would not expect Windows recover software to work because it is expecting a different layout. The fact you got anything is a big surprise to me.

I'd look for OS X recovery software and hope that might work. If I recall right, OS X actually writes a backup table of contents and just maybe that is in tact.

There are recovery houses that charge a small fortune to recover data when it is important to you. I believe the starting price is a grand or two.

If non of above works, shed a single tear and move on in life.