QuickTime Won’t Play XDCam EX Footage After ProApps Codec “Update”

[Ian Cook]

You are trying to play the rewrapped quicktimes? Do you see ‘apple HDV’ in the QuickTime Components folder? This is actually the decoder for all MPEG Long-GOP, including XDCAM. Are you able to render to XDCAM?

[W. Lawrence stevens]

All files (apart from rendered and transcoded ProRes422 and H264) are black and can’t be played; whether native/unedited or rendered from FCP or XDCam Transfer. In FCP7, they are greenscreens. Nothing works if its MPEG-2 and came from XDCam.

Yes, the AppleHDVCodec.component is present. Thank you.

PMW-350
EX1-R
Nikon D3
(wlstevens.com)

[Ian Cook]

I am not seeing this on a 10.6.8 startup disk with all the ProApps updates installed. Have you tried deleting the QT7 and QT X preferences files and maybe doing a p-ram reset?

[W. Lawrence stevens]

Tried deleting all preferences and the P-ram reset several times. Nothing. Tried repairing permissions. Nothing. Tried XDCam Transfer and even the raw footage from our PMW-350 won’t play.

Others are having this same problem: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5492686

We are getting seriously backed up trying to solve this problem. Any assistance is appreciated.

S.

PMW-350
EX1-R
Nikon D3
(wlstevens.com)

[Don Greening]

instead of trying to figure out the problems the update caused it may be faster to do a startup drive reformat and clean install of everything. That way you can start out with earlier versions of FC Studio and the OS10.6.0 install discs which will at least get you up and running again. And then don’t let the Pro Apps updater run. That’s what I would do.

– Don

Don Greening
A Vancouver Video Production Company
Reeltime Videoworks
http://www.reeltimevideoworks.com

[Brett Clark]

We ran into this issue on 2 out of 4 Mac Pros at our shop. That was the odd ball. The updates ran without a hitch on 2 systems but not on the other 2. All 4 are exact same models, same OS and RAM. Confusing. We had to just revert to the previous state, pre-update via image clone. If you Time Machine, just revert to before the update and you should be back running. Other than that, afraid it’s a clean reinstallaroni.
Best of luck
BC

[Ian Cook]

We confirmed that something in the ProApps 1.0.3 update breaks the XDCAM/LongGOP component for most users running 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). It’s been reported to Apple. For now the only possible workarounds are either updating the OS or reverting to a backup taken before the update was applied. There are different possible creative permutations of the latter that may work which we have not yet had an opportunity to test. In the meantime it’s important to for users with an urgent need for Snow Leopard support to report this to Apple.

[I posted this earlier but it appears to have disappeared. Apologies if this eventually shows up as a duplicate post…]

[W. Lawrence stevens]

After extensive trial and error, we managed to solve the problem. It is definitely the ProApps update. We couldn’t update our OS past 10.6.8 (early Mac Pro) and didn’t have a full clone backup. We started by taking Don’s advice and creating a drive with a clean OS 10.6.8. None of the XDCam files would play without the Sony Codecs of course so we then downloaded the latest Sony XDCam FCP “Log & Transfer” application which comes embedded with all the working XDCam Codecs.

Unfortunately, that software would not install without a running version of FCP so we did a fresh install of FCP 6.3 (I think). Once that was updated to 6.8, the XDCam Log & Transfer could install and we were able to again see XDCam QuickTime files. Unfortunately, most of our FCP project files were created with FCP 7.03 and now wouldn’t open. We no longer had the update disks to go from 6.8 to 7.03! Ouch.

Out of desperation, I went back to the old drive, did a fresh install of the XDCam Log & Transfer and also, just out of curiosity, I replaced all the files in the Library/QuickTime folder with the same files from the fresh install disk we had just assembled that was able to play the XDCam QT files. Guess what? It worked.

I am not certain whether it was the fresh install of Log & Transfer or the replacement of the older files in the QuickTime folder that might have been tainted by the ProApps update, we are up and running again.

PMW-350
EX1-R
Nikon D4
(wlstevens.com)

[W. Lawrence stevens]

After extensive trial and error, we managed to solve the problem. It is definitely the ProApps update. We couldn’t update our OS past 10.6.8 (early Mac Pro) and didn’t have a full clone backup. We started by taking Don’s advice and creating a drive with a clean OS 10.6.8. None of the XDCam files would play without the Sony Codecs of course so we then downloaded the latest Sony XDCam FCP “Log & Transfer” application which comes embedded with all the working XDCam Codecs.

Unfortunately, that software would not install without a running version of FCP so we did a fresh install of FCP 6.3 (I think). Once that was updated to 6.8, the XDCam Log & Transfer could install and we were able to again see XDCam QuickTime files. Unfortunately, most of our FCP project files were created with FCP 7.03 and now wouldn’t open. We no longer had the update disks to go from 6.8 to 7.03! Ouch.

Out of desperation, I went back to the old drive, did a fresh install of the XDCam Log & Transfer and also, just out of curiosity, I replaced all the files in the Library/QuickTime folder with the same files from the fresh install disk we had just assembled that was able to play the XDCam QT files. Guess what? It worked.

I am not certain whether it was the fresh install of Log & Transfer or the replacement of the older files in the QuickTime folder that might have been tainted by the ProApps update, we are up and running again.

PMW-350
EX1-R
Nikon D4
(wlstevens.com)

[Don Greening]

Thanks for taking the time to post your solution, Mr. Stevens.

– Don

Don Greening
A Vancouver Video Production Company
Reeltime Videoworks
http://www.reeltimevideoworks.com