Quicktime videos rendered by Media Encoder won't play

[NickPhillips]

I'm having problems getting QuickTime videos rendered by Adobe media encoder to play on my Mac computer. Whenever a QuickTime video is starting up, it says converting, then says it can't be opened. I've tried restarting my computer and reinstalling Media Encoder, but those did not work. It just started yesterday and I have rendered other videos fine in the past week.

[Jeff Bugbee]

What video and audio codec are you using to encode?

[NickPhillips]

Whatever the default ones are. I have never changed them when I use it. I'm just trying to render a premiere pro project. It still works with simple video footage, but not with complicated stuff.

[Jeff Bugbee]

There's no such thing as "default codecs." That's like being asked "What did you order at the restaurant?" and you reply "oh just the default food." It doesn't substantially answer the point of the question. Because to answer your question, we have to know exactly what codec you used.

[NickPhillips]

Something else to note that other videos I've done, about two minutes long, came out to 450 MB of data. The recent one i did, about the same length, was 2.6 GB.

[NickPhillips]

It was exporting as Quicktime. But I rendered it as H.264 and it came out fine.

[Jeff Bugbee]

Quicktime is a container format. H.264 is a codec.

Try exporting as Format: H.264 and make sure AAC is selected for Audio Format.

Quicktime player should play that without converting.

[Warren Heaton]

The list of CODECs that play without converting is pretty short: Apple ProRes, H264, H265 (if running High Sierra), DV-NTSC, MPEG2, Photo-JPEG, DVCPro-HD... I think that's all of them).  If you see "Converting" in QuickTime Player and you want to preview .mov files in the Finder as well as open them in QuickTime Player in future versions of macOS, use a CODEC that does not need to be converted.  Adobe is supporting many of the CODECs no longer supported at the OS level directly in AE, PR, AU, AME and PL due the Apple's switch from QuickTime as the system driver for time based media to AV Foundation Framework (Apple did this back in 2013), but not all of them. For example, a movie compressed with Animation will play inside AE and PR, but not via the Finder preview nor in QuickTime Player without conversion.  Eventually, this type of MOV will be completely ignored by macOS.

Do you have the AME ProRes presets installed?  If not, I highly recommend them.

Adobe - Adobe Media Encoder : For Macintosh : AME CC 2014.1 ProRes presets (Mac only)

That's for CC 2014 and up.