Opening an unfinished .mov file?

[Florence Artur]

Hi All, Is there a way to read a movie file created by SA 3.5 but incomplete? This morning my iMac shut itself down again, while still working on a render I had started yesterday afternoon... I'd like to have a look at the result at least. So far I have tried VLC and mplayer, but they both refuse to open the file. Quicktime too of course. Any suggestion? Thanks Florence

[liveart]

I have several of these types of files, too. Maybe if we all ask in chorus John will program some brilliant utility that can append the necessary end of file data to make them usable. Until then they are bitjunk.

How about it John? anything that can be done?

[Florence Artur]

Oh well. I guess I can just trash the file, then. The good news is, I finally decided to get that MacBook pro I was thinking about. I had my eyes on the cheapest one since my professional future is rather uncertain, but it's out of stock everywhere so I ordered the mid-range one (MacBook Pro 15" Aluminium Intel Core 2 Duo 2,8 GHz). Hopefully things will be a lot faster, and maybe I can start making videos again :-D And order SA4 :-P

[Victor Ingrassia]

This will not fix the problem with your dead file but...
One way to get around this issue is to output an image stream instead of a movie stream. In that case SA creates a series of sequentially numbered still images (in the format of your choosing... jpg, png, tiff, etc). So if there is a crash or freeze of SA or you overall operating system you will safely have all the frames created up to the point of the freeze. There are different approaches to creating a movie from this image sequence. I create a movie from them using QuickTime Pro's "Open Image Sequence" menu item.

[Florence Artur]

Ah, that's a great idea, thanks! I may try that next time I am planning a long render.