What is this??

[Brian Lynn]

We tried MPEG Stream Clip and it can’t repackage or do anything to this video either. We love MPEG Stream Clip, its awesome!

I’m on a PC, but we have MacBookPros onsite as well, and none of them can actually see anything from this video. We’ve tried every tool we know of. Only thing we haven’t done yet is play the file with VLC, and record the output to tape, and reingest. Pretty sure that would work, but what a mess!

I was hoping someone would/could recognize that Welcome screen?

Its not critical that I get this clip to work, we’ve already abandoned it and are pushing for a refund from the stock house, but as this is not the first time I’ve run into this issue so I figured I would come to the best place for solutions again =)

Brian Lynn

[Brian Lynn]

Yeah I wish I had not ever seen it either.

On my PC when I use MPEG Stream Clip it first tells me the file format is not recognizable. Then it asks me if I want to cancel, or open anyway, if I tell it to Open Anyway then MPEG Stream Clip gives me this error:

Apple QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component is not installed…
Please uninstall QuickTime completely. Then install QuickTime Alternative 1.81 (exactly this version), making sure the “Extra QuickTime plugins” checkbox is enabled.
Alternatively, if you have QuickTime and you don’t want to uninstall it, you can buy the MPEG-2 Playback Componenet from Apple Computer.
You can find the QuickTime Alternative here:
(blah blah blah gives a URL and some unimportant other text from here on)

Such an odd problem…

[Brian Lynn]

I had posted this same issue with another clip back in May in the main AE forums. I put the clip up in an FTP (which is down currently) and a member downloaded it and was able to recompress it using Sorenson Squeeze 4.5.

So I downloaded a trial of Sorenson 5, and sure enough it works…

So why does some junk like Sorenson work, yet a full blown professional tool like After Effects or Final Cut Pro can’t touch this clip??

Also interesting: before I installed the Sorenson 5 trial Windows Media Player would not play the file… now it will!

What the heck is going on!

Thanks for the responses! =)
Brian

[Brian Lynn]

I shouldn’t have to pay $500 for another silly media compressor program when I’ve already spent 1000s on what I have… I’m not a fan of Sorenson products anyway… they scare me…

Even the install for Sorenson Squeeze tells you basically that some things CRASH with FFDSHOW installed, so you can “blacklist it” where when you run certain programs it will pretend like its not even installed… This freaks me out to no end! I don’t want scary stuff like this on my system just so I can handle some silly non-standard compressed what ever the heck this is…

Still no idea where that Welcome screen comes from in the screen shot, it doesn’t appear to be part of anything Sorenson.

Windows Media player will play the clips now, but anything QuickTime based will not, like After Effects and QTPro.

I am using this “Squeeze” trial to produce a watermarked sample to see if it is really producing a useable video on export.

I wish some one could just say “oh yeah… I’ve seen that… its because some idiot was using cheap tools to make the video and its broken!”

But that hasn’t happened yet =)
Brian

[Brian Lynn]

These errors are coming from a PC actually…

But as I said, we have MacPros on site, and all of them are Final Cut boxes. All have QT Pro, the MPEG playback component, and none of them can touch this video. I have more luck on the PC trying to get it to do anything.

We’ve tried MPEG Stream Clip on Mac and PC, no luck.
Final Cut can’t touch it.
After Effects Mac and PC both can’t touch it.
Compressor can’t touch it.
Windows Media Encoder can’t touch it.

I’ve even tried Cinelarra (ugh) and it can’t touch it either.

G-Spot tells me I have the codecs installed, but only VLC can get a real handle on it and play it back.

Per my follow up posts, the only thing that can touch this video so far is Sorenson Squeeze 5. And it freaks me out, that software, so I’ve uninstalled it already and reloaded my registry backup.

VLC was the only media player that would actually run the video. Windows Media Player would not play the video, until I installed Sorenson Squeeze 5. It took forever to load but it played back and it played smooth, looked great. Once I uninstalled Sorenson Squeeze 5 (before the registry was restored from backup) and all the scary stuff it installs like ACdsee stuff I think and FFDSHOW stuff, Windows Media Player again would not play the file.

So I got 1/2 way to a solution, but Sorenson is scary. My client has already abandoned this clip a while ago, but I would still like to know for my own personal information banks WHY this is happening. I never feel bad telling a client “your video footage is broken and this is why”. But I feel like a moron when I can’t give them a reason, just give them the symptoms, which to me sound like excuses even though I know they are truth.

Thanks for all your time on this Dave =)

Brian Lynn

[Michael Spencer]

Just a note here. The screen shot is what you get when AE can’t find or read the media you have in your timeline. If you where to used a USB/Firewire hard drive or Network storage and AE couldn’t connect, it would show the imported clip with this image instead. Also if the file is unreadable by AE.

Mike Spencer