so, i’m using 7.0.1 on osx 10.5.2

i recently ran a program called ‘maintenance’ that you can get from apple’s website.

it did the following…

repair permissions
execute maintenance scripts

cleaned:
system cache
applications cache
fonts cache
logs and crash reporter
temporary items

and rebuild launch services

after restarting twice in a row after that was done, i can no longer render a file in camera or renderama using quicktime with an alpha. when i try and open the file in quicktime, AE cs3 or Motion, it always has a white background with no alpha channel. (although the app’s file browser says there is )

(it’s exported as millions+ when i render, i’ve tried as animation and TGA, both single frames and movies....)

movies rendered before this still work fine.

when i render to IMG, it works fine...when i bring the IMG into AE and export as QT mov it works fine…

what do i need to do to fix this? copy some EIAS resource file from another computer with 7.0.1 on it maybe?

thanks....

I think the alpha is there but there are a variety of settings in QT itself for controlling how the alpha is displayed.
Open the movie in the QuickTime player and hit command-J. Select the Video Track and go to the visual settings
tab. You can use the Transparency pull down menu to change the way alpha is handled. It doesn’t change the
alpha channel itself, it just changes the way players use it.

that sort of worked, except now the alpha channel is inverted when i render from EIAS.

it was fine before i tried the maintenance and works fine in other apps...what part of EIAS that would have gotten changed controls how alphas are written?

There is nothing in EIAS to change or alter the QT alpha

thanks, any thoughts on how this has happened and how to fix it?

anyone?

Do you have a link to the program you used?  I’m not aware of such a beat, outside of tools that Apple SUpport techs use.  Although it’s a heated debate, you generally don;t need to do any routine maintenance on OS X.  I do run Disk Util (from boot CD) occasionally, but not that often.

_mike

it’s on apple’s download page. it’s actually called ‘maintenance’.

for tiger there was one called ‘main menu’ that sped things up after you used it. i’m trying to find one that good for leopard. i guess it has to do with how long it takes the caches to load for each app or something. i know that it sped it up though. it’s especially noticeable when you bounce back and forth between apps and launch and quit apps a lot. which is how i usually work…

OK found it.  FYI, not sure if it’s obvious or not, but that NOT an Apple product.  Kind of hard to tell on the downloads page.  Not a big deal, but again, when it comes to system utils, I tend to stick only with APple products. (not a hard and fast rule).

I don’t know what would be causing what you are seeing, but you never know exactly what these tools are doing.  I see that it rebuilds the Launch Services DB, which I could see having some funny side effects for .image files and/or camera launching, etc.

ANyway, sorry I don’t have a specific answer.  You may want to try and run “repair permission” from the install CD.  Not sure why that would do anything, but it might…

_mike

A thing you could try is download Apple’s “Combo Update” installers corresponding to the same versions of OS X you are using: by running them there is the possibility of them setting things back to their correct settings without disturbing anything else that much.

(Also, you could first test if this problem is systemwide or just due to some user account-level preference or such by creating a temporary user account and watching how things behave there)

“(Also, you could first test if this problem is systemwide or just due to some user account-level preference or such by creating a temporary user account and watching how things behave there)”

This is a fantastic troubleshooting technique under OS X.

_mike

there aren’t problems with the .img files. it’s only QT movies with alpha created from camera or renderama. other apps can export them just fine...AE CS3 and Motion both work fine.

but great tips from everyone, so thanks a lot...always good to have more trouble shooting tools...even after 7 years of using apple…