Adobe Premiere Pro 2018 Suddenly Not Reading Video on mp4 that worked 2 wks Ago

Question

Normally I record a video on my Sony xperia mobile phone then open in Premiere, drag it to the timeline and start editing. Just 2 weeks ago I did this without issue. Then today suddenly it treats my recordings as audio only. Both one I recorded today on the same device, and the same recording that worked two weeks ago.

The videos play fine in VLC, but [when I import to Premiere they show wav files and no video track at all](https://i.imgur.com/GUpwpIZ.png).

Things I have tried:

* Clearing the Adobe Cache
* Renaming file extension to mpeg
* Updating studio drivers
* Reinstalling Premiere
* Uninstalling recent Windows Updates
* Restoring my OS to a restore point from 2+ weeks ago

Maybe I could convert them to another file format in order to import them, but that creates an extra step that becomes prohibitively time consuming when many clips are involved. And what's driving me crazy is that I was always able to edit these files from my phone without any problem before.

Anything else I should try?

Nanashi-Akujin · Accepted Answer

The file is using the VP9 codec, which is not supported in Premiere Pro.

If similar files worked before, check the codec of those videos to see if they were using a different format. You may want to adjust your download or recording settings to ensure files use a compatible codec. If you're downloading from Google, see if there's an option to get files in a different format, or consider converting the video to a supported codec like H.264 before importing it into Premiere Pro.

As it happens, I had saved the file that worked two weeks ago in a directory on my laptop, but re-downloaded it directly from google photos this week when I tested it again. I've just chucked both versions of the file, one from two weeks ago and one from this week, into MediaInfo and it turns out that the one of 2 weeks ago was AVC, while the same file downloaded this week was VP9.

So what appears to have happened is that google switched codecs. Since I record on a Sony device and then download to the laptop from google cloud, this change must have caused the sudden failure of Adobe to read the file.

So either I now need to circumvent google or, as you say, convert each file before loading into Premiere, if Premiere can't handle that codec.

PaulMurphy · Answer

Can you provide more technical details about your video clips?Try using a tool like MediaInfo to check the codec, frame rate, and other properties. This information will help diagnose the issue.

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