So, I agreed to help my son's old nursery out with burning their nativity recording to DVD again. Done it for the last couple of years no problem.
This year, I assume they've recorded it to a memory stick as the internal memory on the camcorder is full. One problem, the video isn't accessible. If I turn the camcorder on, it beeps at me saying that the memory card inserted might have trouble displaying media. If I try and view media, there appear to be two videos, but neither can be opened.
If I put the card in a card reader, then it opens up, but there's only one video there...from 2009.
Any ideas, other than telling the nursery + all parents that the video of their darling children is lost forever?

Try photorec

It might give you a chance. I've used it a number of times when people have accidentally deleted photos and videos.

Whatever you do, don't write any data to the memory card at all until after you've ran photorec.

As Ant says don't write anything to the card or you'll likely lose the lot.

If it's definitely on the card but for some reason not showing something that recovers the fat table stuff would probably do the job. Plenty of stuff out there, but I've always found GetDataBack to be one of the best but it isn't free.

I had this problem with my brother in law's camera last year and had to make an image of the SD card, go through the card manually with a hex editor and piece together the individual bits of the video files that were spread out through the card. Hopefully something like Photorec, GetDataBack, sometihing else will recover the whole thing.

Any of those available on a free trial or jim basis?

Looks like Photorec is free but the other one you could borrow off Jim if the first dones't work.

You can also try Recuva. That's good at retrieving things (even from formatted media) and is legally free as well.

Well for some reason trying to copy everything off my old phones memory card has caused it to fuck up. Photorec is now trying to recover whatever it can.