Unable to open "Excellent" recovered file

Backstory:

On a secondary hard drive I use exclusively for recording videos I accidentally deleted a video file (.avi) that was too large to go to the recycle bin so was just deleted. I searched around to find some way to recover it and came across this program.

Current Events:

I used to to attempt to recover the file while Recuva tells me is in excellent condition with no errors. I recover it to my main hard drive's desktop, as Recuva tells me restoring to the same hard drive isn't such a great idea. The file is restored (albiet with a different name but same deletion date). I try to open it with VLC only to be told that the file can't be opened. I find out that the file is only 544 bytes, which confuses me. I do not write anything to this drive except when recording and there has been no writing to this drive since I deleted the file not an hour ago. So is it because the cluster was broken or what?

So, tldr: File can’t be recovered despite being told it can be. Suggestions?

Did you try to send the file to the recycler before you deleted it? A file in the recycler consists of two parts, an index containing the file name etc and the data part. The index component, which is usually named as $Innnn.ext, is fixed at 544 bytes, so it looks as if that's what you are recovering. You need to look for a much larger file.

If the avi file was larger than 4gb then the chances of recovery are not good.