After Effects 25.4 won't import mp4 videos

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
September 9, 2025
3 replies
274 views

I’m on version 25.4 and was able to import QuickTime (MP4) videos from a coworker yesterday, they screen recorded them on their iPad. But when I try to import MP4s recorded on my own iPad, After Effects gives me the error: “The source compression type is not supported and this ‘MooV’ file is damaged or unsupported." The videos aren’t corrupted, they play fine in QuickTime and Preview. When I tested the same files in After Effects 24, they imported without any issues.

Does anyone know what’s causing this and how to fix it?

Correct answer yuliya_4436

In a hilarious turn of events, clearing the cache and reverting preferences to default fixed it....why wouldn't the warning tell me there was an issue with the cache/preferences instead of saying the format was incompatible????? Adobe you need to work on this, I wasted over an hour on this.

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yuliya_4436AuthorCorrect answer

Participant

In a hilarious turn of events, clearing the cache and reverting preferences to default fixed it....why wouldn't the warning tell me there was an issue with the cache/preferences instead of saying the format was incompatible????? Adobe you need to work on this, I wasted over an hour on this.

nishu_kush

Legend

Thanks for writing in. Glad to hear that you were able to fix it. If you face any issues again, you can run After Effects in Safe Mode. It'll launch After Effects with a fresh set of preferences so that you can test the issue. Your original preferences do not get removed.

Feel free to reach out if there are any other questions.

Thanks,
Nishu

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yuliya_4436Author

Participant

Thanks for writing back, but I find this comment unhelpful. Sure, I’ll keep this in mind moving forward, but it feels more like a workaround than a fix because this is clearly a bug. If the pop-up said that there was an issue with the preferences or cache or even if it just gave me an unknown error, I would have known to try safe mode but instead I wasted time because it gave me a pop-up indicating a format incompatibility.

Also, I haven’t significantly changed my preferences or used any plugins, so I don’t really understand how the cache or preferences would have caused this issue in the first place.

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yuliya_4436Author

Participant

Converting to QuickTime ProRes 422 makes it work but that's a 1 gig file vs the original 44 mb. There must be a better way!

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yuliya_4436Author

Participant

Converting to h.264 using media encoder did not fix it.