QuickTime Player is an application that comes with Mac OS X.
- QuickTime Player (version 7) can be upgraded to QuickTime Pro, adding recording and editing capabilities.
- Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard replaces QuickTime 7 by QuickTime Player version 10, or QuickTime X. Recording and basic editing are available without upgrade.
- QuickTime 7 can be installed in Mac OS X 10.6, allowing to use versions 7 and X concurrently.
Usage
It is often used to record videos, like entries of a video log with the built-in iSight camera, or to record footage with an external camera.
It is recommended to avoid using other applications during recording, as they can steal computing bandwidth and video quality can degrade.
Formats
Depending on the quality setting used for recording, the damaged file will have one of the following formats:
- QuickTime X or QuickTime 7 "Best": Creates a QuickTime .mov container with video H264 640x480 and audio AAC stereo 44100Hz.
- QuickTime 7 "Better": Creates a QuickTime .mov container with video H264 320x240 and audio AAC stereo 44100Hz.
- QuickTime 7 "Good": Creates a QuickTime .mov container with video MPEG4 640x480 and audio AAC stereo 44100Hz.
How to recover a movie after QuickTime crashed?
The recording process can fail for a number of reasons, like battery failure or lack of disk space. In most cases, you can recover the movie following a few easy steps:
1. Find the temporary file containing the audio or video.
The first and most important thing is to prevent the file from being deleted by the system. As it's a temporary file, rebooting the computer could delete the file.
Do not reboot your computer!
We will find the file and move it to a safe place. The location of the file depends on the volume on which you were recording:
- In Boot volume:
Boot volume is usually your internal hard disk. It’s the disk that contains the operating system and your home folder.
In this case, the movie file is located in /private/var/folders/
This folder is not visible in the Finder. It's hidden because you are not supposed to store your data here. But there's a way to explore this folder anyway:
From the Finder, use menu Go > Go to Folder... and type/private/var/folders/
A Finder window opens, revealing a few subfolders. Now you can search inside, until you find one or several files with extension .mov and whose date of creation matches the QuickTime recording incident.
Just move those files to the Desktop. Once on the Desktop, the files are safe.
- In an external drive, or a volume that is not the boot volume:
In this case the file should be in this folder:
/Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk/.TemporaryItems/folders.501/TemporaryItems/
Note the . before TemporaryItems, it makes the folder invisible in the Finder.
You must use Go > Go to Folder... and type the path like this:
/Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk/.TemporaryItems/
Do not forget to replace nameOfExternalDisk by the real name of the volume!
- Then explore the subfolders until you find the .mov files whose creation date correspond to the QuickTime session, and move them to a new folder on the same volume.
2. Repair the file
Now the files are in a safe place. You can reboot your computer if needed.
As the recording process was interrupted, the files are not playable: QuickTime gives an error message when you try to open them.<\p>
Fortunately, there is Treasured, and you can diagnose and preview the file.
- Check the size of the file to evaluate the duration of the recorded clip: Sometimes QuickTime crashes or stops recording well before you notice it, and the damaged movie file contains only the first seconds or minutes of the "show". This can be verified by estimating the duration with the Time Calculator.
- Use Treasured to preview the damaged file.
- Send a Repair Request through Treasured if you are interested in recovering the lost video.