So I was given some footage with absolutely no knowledge of how it was shot, or what format it was, but was not worried as I have am running Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Unfortunately I was wrong.
They all appear to be quicktime movies, but will not open in anything, or if they do only audio appears. And when I opened them in VLC it says it is a missing XALG encoder.
The only thing I could find on this issue is this unanswered post at Adobe Forums, and it seems to be my exact problem.
It turns out these are MXF files shot from a Sony Camera, and they were brought in through Final Cut Pro X (which I do not have on this machine), and it wrapped it in an MOV with the XALG encoder. The strange part is I do have the latest version of Motion so that I can get the Apple Pro Codec Updates, so you would think it would have the codec to play the video, but even motion won’t open this quicktime movies.
Luckily I was able to get the person with the footage to send the original cards that the footage was shot on, and was able to copy them over and import the MXF files directly into Premiere Pro with no problem, but I can’t seem to get the MOV’s that Final Cut Pro X to open in anything. I figured Motion would do it, and was thinking maybe Compressor, but if Motion can’t do it I am not spending the $50 on compressor, and certainly not paying Apple for Final Cut Pro again because it made some video footage useless.
This is a huge issue. Final Cut Pro X should not do anything to the files it imports, it should just play them all natively. That it wraps them in another file that makes them unusable by other programs makes me dislike this program even more.