Codex/format troubleshooting when exporting video

[Mikkola]

I don't seem to able to export anything in movie format. Whenever I try to do that I get a following message:

The movie “test1” can’t be opened because the file is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.

There's most likely something wrong with the codex settings or preferences. Could someone more experienced tell me what it is. Thanks!

[Synthetik]

Are you running Studio Artist on a mac or windows?

What compression codec are you using for movie file output?

Did you include a '.mov' file extension to the name of the output movie file?

What program are you using to try to open the movie files and getting the format error message in?

[Mikkola]

It's on Mac. Adding .mov doesn't make a difference. Whatever program automatically opens the file, in my case it's quicktime player. The question was about codec settings, I have tried pretty much all of them.

[Synthetik]

You should open a tech support ticket, so that you can get some personalized tech support help with your issue. There are tons of people using Studio Artist to generate movie file output on macs without problems, so interacting with tech support is probably the best way to resolve your specific issues, which seem to be out of the ordinary. When you submit your tech support ticket, you should provide as much specific information as possible to help tech support understand exactly what you are doing (specific presets, menu commands you are using, codec type, SA version, osx version, etc).

All i can offer here are a few general observations.

Some applications on the mac require the .mov file extension, or they won't know what file type the movie file is. Quicktime Player 7 (and it's Pro option) is better than Quicktime Player X as far as working with movie files on the mac in my opinion.

Some recent applications do not necessarily support the complete range of quicktime codecs you can use for Studio Artist output. Quicktime Player Pro 7 is great if you run into that kind of situation and need to re-encode a rendered movie file into a different codec format.

If you start rendering a movie file and then don't close the file, it will show up as damaged when you try to open it somewhere else. using the action menu movie generation commands, this would only happen if Studio Artist crashed for some reason while rendering the movie file. With an open movie stream, if you don't close the open movie stream when finished rendering to it, that could cause problems.

[Synthetik]

Tech Support started a support ticket for you for this issue this morning. You should have received an email from our support desk.  Please answer the questions Peter asked you and he will try to figure out your movie problems for you and get you up and running.

[Lucas Krech]

The .MOV extension is just a container. The real work happens in the codec. There are a wide array of codecs available depending on your use case. For web something like h264 is good to use. For live media performance you may want something like photoJPEG. This is a very general answer to a rather deep area.

A program like Compressor ($50 in the app store) should read nearly any file and convert it to any supported codec. For free option there is VLC media player. For something in the middle there is Quicktime 7 Pro (though it is tricky to find). Quicktime X has rather limited codec options available to it and uses a very different software under the hood than does the older Quicktime 7.

HTH.