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“None” Compression With Millions Of Colors+ Not Playing In QT
(This is technically a Quicktime issue, not Final Cut. However since Final Cut uses QT to play video this seems to be an appropriate place to post my question. I’ve used Creative Cow as a resource for a long time and finally registered to post today, so hi!)
A client of mine recently upgraded to a new i7 iMac and has installed both Quicktime X and Quicktime 7. He plays back video in both programs off of a local file server and both players handle most files alright, even Uncompressed stuff. However, .mov files with the compression type “None” (no compression at all) don’t display video in both players. Instead, he gets a black video window (audio plays just fine). I re-exported the video from within his copy of QT7 and noticed that color was set to “Millions Of Colors+”. I switched this to “Millions Of Colors” (no “+”) before re-exporting, without changing anything else, and the new video plays back just fine. However, there are dozens of files like this one and there are likely to be more in the future. Does anyone here know of a solution to this problem that doesn’t require re-encoding everything just for him? NOTE: All the other machines in the office play the file down correctly.
Some extra details:
-It is my understanding that the “+” means there should be an additional alpha channel. However, I see no indication of there being one in the Properties window
-When I scrub through the video in QT7, the playhead lags behind the mouse the same way that it would if QT was crunching through uncompressed frames, so obviously it’s doing something with the video.
-When I set up the re-export, the thumbnail preview in the lower-right corner of the video settings dialog displays it’s preview image just fine, even though QT7 and X play nothing.If anyone has any insights into this issue, I’d be grateful.
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6 Replies
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None is a rather ancient “legacy” codec that is very inefficient and no longer used anywhere. The animation codec is also old and virtually obsolete, you should most likely be transcoding to ProRes 422 and you can make a droplet in Compressor to do it all as a batch, unattended.
Oh, and the reason it won’t play is most likely because it’s very demanding on hard drives.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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It isn’t a hard drive / network speed issue- larger, higher-resolution uncompressed files play down, as well as Animation. In addition, the Millions Of Colors version of the file that I re-export also plays back without problems over the network and it’s the same size and rate.
My concern is that his computer simply isn’t playing any .mov files with None “compression” and Millions Of Colors+ as the color setting, when support for both of these are supposed to be built into Quicktime (Correct?). I could tell him to just create a Compressor droplet, but I’d rather be able to fix the problem instead of introducing a workaround- These files often come from other studios or post facilities and they would likely want to be able to play them back as is.
There are only a few codecs in his Library/Quicktime Might there be some sort of codec/driver that I can add to Quicktime to possibly fix “None” compression support?
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[Nathan Rosenquist] “the Millions Of Colors version of the file that I re-export also plays back without problems over the network and it’s the same size and rate.
My concern is that his computer simply isn’t playing any .mov files with None “compression” and Millions Of Colors+ “
If you couldn’t read the codec NONE, you would be getting a white screen in QT Player.
I don’t think there is any problem about the codec (NONE is playable in any Mac/PC with QT), but something about the Alpha channel.
Bring the file to FC and put it on top of a colored background.
Rafael -
Hey guys,
I’m jumping on this thread for clarification. I was under the impression that the uncompressed “animation” codec would state that it is animation in qt item info.
I’ve run into this situation before, where files I get say “none” as compressor.
My question, how do u know that “none” is animation codec?
-Jason
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Hi Jason,
Both are different codecs.
In the list of usual QT codecs you will find NONE and Animation.
NONE makes the bigger RGB files you can get.
NONE is a 8b RGB codec without any kind of compression (plain 8b per channel).
Animation is also an 8b RGB codec but, being lossless, it use somekind of file compression scheme (no picture compression). This is why Animation makes files some 5 folds smaller than NONE.
Both support Alpha channel.
rafael -
Rafeal, thanks for the clarification…it was a bit confusing that “none” was something 🙂
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