After effects/Quicktime problem! HELP!

[John Lanigan]

Hi Chris,

I’ve had similar issues with After Effects and Quicktime on a 32 bit Vista OS. I’ve found a temporary workaround solution so maybe it might work for you too, when I first stumbled across the workaround in the Apple forums with other people encountering I couldn’t believe it would work but to my surprise it did.

First off though you’ve specified that you are only encountering issues with .MOV files? Forgetting about After Effects for a minute, have you tried playing these .MOV just in quicktime, are you getting problems here, choppy playback, crappy sound, quicktime occasionally crashing etc?. As these were my symptoms, as part of my tests trying to diagnose the problem I uninstalled Quicktime and I decided to try both “K-Lite Mega Codec Pack” and also “VideoLAN – VLC media player”. Both of these media player alternatives played the .MOV files perfectly. However once I reinstalled Quicktime it had the same playback problems as previously and unfortunately After Effects only seems to accept Quicktime itself for rendering work.

Anyway try the above tests after removing Quicktime to see if .MOV media play ok in the other media players. Anyway I digress, it appears that in my case Quicktime has a conflict with the Nvidia chipset of my motherboard, the workaround which was suggested in the Apple forums for me and which I can confirm works is to copy any .MOV files to an external USB drive, YES you read it right, once the .MOV is copied to an external USB drive the media will play correctly in Quicklime and work properly in After Effects. Go figure eh. I’m not sure if this workaround will work for you but try it out.

[Christopher Carlsson]

Thank you so much for that awnser! It seems like we have the same problem, choppy play, around 16-7 fps I would say. So ill try that! Thanks!

[Christopher Carlsson]

Hey again! Tha playback now works fine, no chopping here no! But.. the important part is still not good, After effects crashes the moment I import a MOV into my project files… Im gonna try to reinstall it and see if it helps!

[John Lanigan]

Well hopefully the reinstall will get around your problem. Provided any of my footage is imported into After Effects from an external drive it plays fine so I hope this works for you too. Glad you had some progress.

[Christopher Carlsson]

Aff… It didn’t work, still freezes the moment it hits the project files… What could do that? It doesn’t matter if its from my HDD or the USB drive, still freezes..

[John Lanigan]

Ah thats unfortunate, we had seemed to be on the right track. Does quicktime ever crash on you with a “Buffer Overrun” error?

[Austen Mathieson]

the problem is apple quicktime, they fckued up BIG time.
I’ve found over 3500 complaints on various sites about QT probs.

It’s not AE it’s QT

Austen Mathieson
Austentatious Productions

[Christopher Carlsson]

Yes, I figuered that out a while ago 😉

@ John: No, not what ive seen.. Im gonna see if I can record it, so you can see exacly what i mean..

[Christopher Carlsson]

No one who knows whats wrong? I reaaaally need this to work…

[Joe Moya]

If you are getting desperate looking for options…

…try changing out your video card…preferable one that is NOT compatible with DX10…. in your case that would be a 7000 series instead of the 8000 series.

I have seen situations where this can cause problems… although the problems are with Avid editiors and not so much with AE.

I think this is a slim chance this could be your problem… but, it appears you are starting to run out of options. Hopefully, this unlikely culprit (i.e., change the video card) may save the day.