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h.264 MOVs Won’t Play in FCP 7 or QT7Pro but will in QT10.2
Hey, guys!
I’ll keep it as short and sweet as possible, I have a tendency to be long-winded.
The agency I work for hired a production company to shoot and edit a spot we didn’t have time to do. They shot with a new-ish Canon camera (5d Mk II, I think) and edited in FCP 7 using the H.264s that came out of the camera. There was so little real editing (it was well-planned-out enough they didn’t need to) that they just worked with the H.264 files.
They delivered the finished spots and the spots turned out great. Now the client wants to make one change a couple months after-the-fact and we’d like to deal with it in-house.
––––––– So that’s the setup (I told you I’m long-winded). –––––––
I’ve got their project and their footage but our FCP7 won’t display the footage.
I can hear audio but the picture is black in both the viewer and in the canvas windows. I DID make sure those windows were set to display the image. They displayed the graphics but just wouldn’t display the footage right with it on the timeline. It’s not telling me I need to render, but even when I force it to make me render (adding effects, etc.) it still gives me a black picture.
I can open and play the footage with QT10.2. I get the correct picture and audio.
If I open the footage with QT7Pro, I get a no picture (black) but I get appropriate audio.
I tried to use Media Manager, Batch Export and Compressor to convert the files (both from inside FCP and outside of FCP) to a filetype I could use – no luck. I continue to get no picture and sometimes audio.
Any ideas of what I can do to make this whole thing work?
Thanks for any help you guys can lend! If this has already been answered (though I didn’t find it by searching), feel free to point me in the right direction!
Thanks again!
Over,
Tyler
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5 Replies
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[Tyler Schmalz] “I can hear audio but the picture is black” Sounds like a codec issue. h.264 is NOT an FCP 7 friendly codec.
Did you get the original camera data or just the h.264 files?
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Creative Pro Users Group -
Step 1, download and install perian from here: https://perian.cachefly.net/Perian_1.2.3.dmg and install it
Step 2 download mpeg streamclip from here: https://www.squared5.com/
Step 3 Open Mpeg streamclip, press cmd + B to open a batch list, drag ALL the footage in question into it.
An option window will come up asking you what to convert it to, choose quicktime movie, select options and change the codec to something final cut friendly. Lots and lots of people here would recommend pro res but I thing that for DSLR footage prores is massive overkill, so I’d suggest something smaller like xdcam.
Step 4 use the newly encoded footage in final cut and never try and edit with H264 footage again. Its horrible horrible stuff.Tom Morter-Laing
Twitter- @TomTheEditor
_________________________________________________iMac 27″ intel i7 3.4GHz, 12GB RAM, ATI HD 6970M [2GB GDDR5], 3x G-Tech G-RAID (0) 2TB over Thunderbolt via Sonnet Echo Pro ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt adapter and Tempo™ SATA Pro 6Gb ExpressCard/34.
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I’m going to venture a guess that the original spot you have was edited using Final Cut X. Do you have that or only 7?
E=MC2+/-2db
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Thanks a million, this worked!
I had MPEG Streamclip and Perian before but I’ve only used Steamclip for some small random stuff, I had no idea it would deal with the h.264s and/or do a large batch of stuff so well.
This worked perfectly, thanks!
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I have no idea to be 100% positive what it was originally edited using. Their guys said FCP 7 but he might have misspoke, etc.
Either way, it’s all solved now. Thanks for the help, guys!
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