[Mike Quinn]

I’ve run into this same problem in the past and again today trying to work with a downloaded youtube video in .mp4.

Spent easily a couple of hours trying to find a plugin for Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 (according to their online help, it is supposed to be able to import .mp4 … subject to a cryptic note about possibly needing the right plugin to do it). No luck finding it though.

I eventually downloaded a trial version of a converter here:

https://www.bigasoft.com/articles/how-to-import-mp4-to-premiere.html

but this trial version has a 5 minute limit for source videos over 5 minutes and limits the conversion to half of the video for videos under 5 minutes. Ok for testing their product I guess. Not so for project work obviously. It did work but did crash once or twice.

I’d seen another post somewhere suggesting to try changing the file extension to other mp4-ish formats (i can’t recall which but they weren’t .mov) in any case, they wouldn’t import into PP CS3.

Miraculously, it seems, changing the file extension from .mp4 to .mov did allow me to import the clip into PP CS3.

A note of caution however, and I suspect this is inherent in the efficiency of mp4 vs mpeg2, exporting the mov file back out of PP CS3 say as an AVI file creates massive files. The original youtube file as an 3m40sec mp4 was approx 92 MB. The same clip, has taken over 30 minutes to export as an avi and is only about half done and is already close to 500 MB.

Clearly I’m not approaching this with the right codecs or even the right way.

[Mike Quinn]

I had the exact same problem. I had created some custom scripts to run under the Batch command. After using those scripts without problems for some months, today after Photoshop CS3 froze, upon rebooting my PC (Win XP SP3) the File > Automate > Batch command showed up greyed out (inaccessible).

Following Mr. Hannaford’s suggestion i believe causes Photoshop CS3 to recreate a new ‘Actions Palette.psp’ file containing the default scripts which ship with Photoshop CS3.

CAUTION:

However, in the process, any other scripts you had created in the ‘Actions Palette.psp’ file you are deleting or renaming prior to restarting Photoshop will be lost (especially if you deleted the file).

In my case, I took the precaution of making a copy of and renaming my ‘Actions Palette.psp’ before deleting that file.

Sure enough, on re-starting Photoshop, the batch command had re-appeared but was only giving the original default set of scripts. All my scripts were ‘lost’ (I wasn’t sure where Photoshop stored the scripts I had created and half hoped that they were stored in a file other than the ‘Actions Palette.psp’ file but I wasn’t surprised.).

A hint as to the cause of the Batch command becoming greyed out in my case was likely due to Photoshop corrupting the ‘Actions Palette.psp’ file. The original one which I copied was only showing a size of 1k before I deleted it. The rebuilt one with the default scripts (per Mr. Hanneford’s instructions) shows a size of 20k (therefore my ‘Actions Palette.psp’ file should have shown a size greater than 20k). So … I wouldn’t have been able to re-construct my scripts in any case from the copy I made.

So, before you delete your ‘Actions Palette.psp’ file, check its size. If it is say 20k or above, it may not be corrupted and the source of your problem may lie elsewhere such as with the preferences which need to be purged.