Trouble with opening a video clip

[HapHazzard]

The video is an MP4
I used VLC to convert to an AVI but still SAW gives me a 'Trouble building video graph'

Windows 10 64bit
Running SAW under XP compatible

[Todd R]

I get this a lot. Once you get those “trouble building video graph” or “trouble opening file, possibly no longer exists” error dialogs with video viewer import, that file isn’t going to work. Something went wrong with your avi encoding. Video encoding is mystical black magic, so understanding what actually went wrong is a pointless excercise, ime. Sometimes a re-render with Adobe Media Encoder will work, often, tho, I need a re-export from Adobe Premiere Pro from one of my company’s video editors.

[MMP]

An AVI file is a container that can support many types of codec. This probably is a case of being encoded with a codec that is not installed correctly on your computer and you get the error message.

Does the same file play successfully in Windows Media Player?

[HapHazzard]

Yes, both the mp4 and the converted avi. The mp4 came from a mac user.

[MMP]

Yes, both the mp4 and the converted avi. The mp4 came from a mac user.

In that case I would suspect the file name. Make a simplified DOS style name for the AVI and see if it plays then.

[HapHazzard]

Never was able to load the clip no matter how it was converted.
Comes up in a variety of players.
I asked to have it sent over as an AVI file.

The far end is doing an update on their software.
Are the other parameters I should ask for?

Hap

[HapHazzard]

In that case I would suspect the file name. Make a simplified DOS style name for the AVI and see if it plays then.

Gave DOS style a try. A No-go!

[HapHazzard]

I get this a lot. Once you get those ***8220;trouble building video graph***8221; or ***8220;trouble opening file, possibly no longer exists***8221; error dialogs with video viewer import, that file isn***8217;t going to work. Something went wrong with your avi encoding. Video encoding is mystical black magic, so understanding what actually went wrong is a pointless excercise, ime. Sometimes a re-render with Adobe Media Encoder will work, often, tho, I need a re-export from Adobe Premiere Pro from one of my company***8217;s video editors.

My Adobe Media Encode must be too old. It's 32bit :-(
I could make a big effort to reload one of my older i5 SAW platform that has XP but I'll try to have far end give it a try on converting it first.

[Todd R]

All the editors I work with use Premiere Pro on Mac.
Once I get a “trouble opening file” error dialogue when importing in SAW, that vid will never work...whether VLC or Adobe ME...I’ve tried other convertors like XMedia Recode and never got that to work. The video has to be re-rendered from the vid editing software, IME. I ALWAYS rename to a no spaces, only letters, numbers, underscore, hyphen filename before import.

A couple of years ago Adobe removed AVI 1 from ME in CC. My video editors have to work a little harder to export a usable vid for SAW. I got a bit of flak about using “outdated” software (but I’m the boss ;-P). I asked on this forum back then and Bob explained thst AVI retains every keyframe and other, more compressed wrappers, like mp4, throw out thousands of keyframes to acheive their compression.

This has helped me using Propellerhead Reason to score to picture. I use a 3rd party video player called Retouch Control for video sync with Reason. When I first started using this scenario, sync would be lost after the first rewind. I had assumed this workflow was flawed. The problem was mp4. Using AVI never loses sync with this set up. Thanks Bob :-D Propellerheads certainly didn’t help!

Good luch getting the editors to resubmit a re-render :-)

[MMP]

I pretty much always re-render any MP4 to an AVI using Pavtube and the Xvid codec. One anomaly of this setup is the second frame of every transcoded video is duplicated, so I always remove that within the video track. This workflow has been solid for me for a number of years.