Importing video in After Effects no video only sound

I'm experiencing the same issue. I've tried using the Media Recorder, but it's not working properly, while other editing programs are functioning just fine. I'm feeling really frustrated. I've literally tried EVERYTHING, but nothing seems to work. This started happening over

I used QuickTime to export, and it worked!

I had this same problem with an MOV file taken on a phone. I tried re-encoding to mp4, H264, ProRes, and other formats via Adobe Media Encoder, and nothing worked. Then I tried opening the file in QuickTime and exporting directly from there. And upon importing the new mov to After Effects, it worked! I have audio and video now in AE, and am very happy.

I'm not sure exactly why it worked when I used QuickTime to export. My guess is that since Adobe stopped servicing QuickTime in 2018 (?), that it wasn't able to correctly interpret the QuickTime codec, but QuickTime obviously can.

There are sometimes some extension changes that have worked too especially not knowing the origin.  I've seen this mostly with AVI files, but try change the extension to .mpeg, .avi.  No certainty but worth a try and only takes a second.

Eric

I have the exact same situation - a H264 mp4 file supplied by a client.  It plays fine in VLC Player but imports into AE and Premier with no visible video.  It has audio but it looks almost like it has a whole screen of alpha channel when put into a timeline.

I tried deleting the Media Cache folders as Jonah_UMG suggested above and that made no difference.

I'm using the latest version of CC 2018 (version 15.1.2 build 69) and when I tried importing the same clip in CC 2014 on the same PC, that plays fine - video visible.  So either I could work in CC 2014 or render the video out as a new file and then import that into CC 2018 (I did the latter).

Incidentally it also imports fine into the oldest AE version we can go back to on our CC bundle, which is CS6.

So for me it seems to be a codec issue with that CC 2018 version.

I had this same issue and may have found the issue: a corrupt Media Cache / Media Database.

I closed AE, went to my library manually deleted my media cache & database folders via Finder (I didn't use the cleaner buttons in AE's preferences), emptied the trash.

After this, I re-imported the problem files and they showed as video files.

Hopefully this works for everyone else as well.

I have the same issues and eventually i updated my AE software then replace the footages you have, and all problems have been fixed. Hope it can help you too:)

Hi jackib, did you check out npribil's suggestion?

Thanks,
Kevin

My first idea would be to try and reencode the mp4 with Media Encoder and then try to import that file into After Effects. Maybe that fixes the problem.