QuickTime 7.2: Exporting woes

QuickTime 7.2 is causing significant problems with audio/video exporting -- a set of issues we neglected to cover substantially in our QuickTime 7.2 special report. Given that workflows for video production are being broken on a broad scale, it's worth giving some extra attention.

Unfortunately, the only viable fix for these issues we've yet encountered is a downgrade to QuickTime 7.1.6 by forcing its installation via these steps:

1. Download QuickTime 7.1.6 but do not attempt to install
2. Download and launch Pacifist
3. In Pacifist, click the "Open Package" button, then locate and open the QuickTime 7.1.6 .pkg file.
4. Click the lock and enter your administrator password, then click the "Install" button.]
5. Download and install the Mac OS X 10.4.10 combo updater.

AppleScript errors (NSInternalScriptError) One serious issue is that accessibility to QuickTime export routines through AppleScript appear to be broken, in some cases, after the update. This is, obviously causing significant difficulties for users who have scripted workflows that make use of QuickTime export routines.

MacFixIt reader Leor Bleier writes:

"There appears to be a problem with the QuickTime 7.2 update when it's called by AppleScript. I have a script I wrote that uses the 'save self contained' QuickTime command which used to work with QuickTime 7.1.6, but I now encounter an 'NSInternalScriptError' when the script reaches the 'save self contained' line."

No audio Another, equally grave issue is that soundtracks fail to properly export for some movies after the 7.2 update.

Oe reader writes:

"I upgraded to the newest version of Quicktime a couple of days ago on a mirrored door PowerMac and a Mac book. Both run on OSX 10.10. I have a lot of videos to complete but now have a serious problem. Video encodes correctly but the audio tracks all stop after a second or two. This happens on both machines with all settings that I have tried. It happens when exporting a scene from MovieWorks /MediaWorks and when re-encoding a good .mov file."

"I cloned the drive a short time ago with OSX 10.9 and QT 7.1.6. When booting from this drive with the previous version of QT encoding the sound track is complete. I deleted the plist files. I trashed QT and reinstalled. Permissions, cache etc were repaired and cleaned. nothing has helped on either machine."

Separate tracks generated In the same vein, some users are experiencing an issue where video and audio on tracks are being split into two separate files when they were intended to be joined.

A reader writes:

"Reading all about the problems in QuickTime 7.2. Thought I was immune. Well I'm not. Just created a Keynote presentation with a sound track and exported it as a self playing QuickTime movie. The resulting file should have given me a movie with 2 separate tracks: video and sound. I've done this a lot, and it has always worked this way. Now in QT 7.2 it doesn't. The resulting file ends up being 2 separate movie files! One file contains only 1 track: 'sound.' And the other file has 2 tracks in it, but not the correct, playable 2 tracks. There's a 'video' track (as it should be) and in place of the usual 'sound' track, I get a 'movie' track (whatever that means) that has no sound it it. So I have to delete the meaningless 'movie' track, and copy the 'sound' track from the other file (then trash that file since I don't need it anymore) and then add that 'sound' track to the file with the 'movie' track. I end up with a file with 2 tracks, video and sound, exactly what I should have gotten in the beginning."

If you are experiencing similar issues, please let us know.

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