Video stuck on “Preparing Video”

I was able to fix this issue by double tapping the video when it was stuck. The progress would go back to 0 and slowly make its way to 100%. I was able to do this twice.

seems the issue happens if you lock or move away from the photo app while it’s preparing.

If you’re still having this problem first revert the video to it’s original state. Press the share button on the video and select duplicate. Edit the new video to your liking and when done select “save as new video”

Hope this helps anyone still experiencing this bug!

Double tap your video zooming in, Preparing video might restart but it will continue working on it. I think it happens when iPhone sleeps amidst processing session so make sure to keep scrolling video left to right while it's processing the video. Setting iPhone to sleep much later would help too. For me, 11 minutes video took 8 minutes to finish resizing on iPhone 12 pro max.

I have a fix, instead of 'Save Video', choose 'Save Video as New Clip'. This will create a duplicate, to the right of the original, then you can delete the original.

I had this problem too. If you scroll to the bottom of your photos it will say uploading x amount of photos to iCloud.. the blue line will not be complete, in order for it to complete your phone needs to be on wifi and locked. 5 mins later it was done and the video was no longer being prepared.

I was right now having this problem with my iPhone 12 Pro and after seeing your question and that other people were having the same problem I decided to give a try to simply turn off my phone and when I turned it on, it helped.

I had this exact same problem and I decided to turn off my phone like and turn it back off and it worked!! Try it and see if that helps.

Turning the phone 90 degrees and double tapping screen to resume rendering actually worked.. Mind boggling & most inconvenient

Double tapping the video worked without the need of a hard reset. Seems that is a bug and apple should fix it.

This happened to me also, but all you have to do is shut down your device, and then try it again, and it should work. 👍

The solution is just reboot your phone then your Photo app will restart the video edit. I suspect that iOS is re-using the old caches that's why it keeps failing. Using iOS 14.5.

Unfortunately, Apple is aware of this issue but doesn't want to admit that its ecosystem is part of the problem. Lol and no this is not "Solved" Apple administrator. Apple seems to be running some pretty heavy algorithms for the cameras. The quality of the photos that come from the pro series isn't an authentic, truly captured image, at least not based on what I have seen in testing.

I think its algorithm issues that Apple runs to make their cameras capture better quality than the camera is actually capable of getting. Apple isn't going to come out and say that is the issue but that's my theory. Anyways, below is my small solution. I hope it helps some. If it works, I'm sad to say that someone who isn't on Apples roster cares more about its customers than Apple. These solutions may seem wanky, but give them a shot and you might be surprised.

My solution:

Step 1) Turn off and unsubscribe to iCloud Photos. If want to stay subscribed you can, but I personally turn my iCloud photos off and use a different storage method. If you have any photos, and internet connection issues, iCloud can throttle some of your ability to seamlessly use the photos. Why? Because their service is constantly trying to upload (Sync) versions of your videos and photos to the web while you are using them. Imagine making a purchase at a store and instead of walking out of the store, you get back in line and purchase the same item again and again. Ok, not the perfect comparison but it can cause issues.

Step 2) Try the hard reset mentioned in other threads. But this might not be necessary. It's just a good way to clear out some gunk.

Step 3) Delete your photos that are corrupted then undelete them. No joke here. Go ahead and delete the photos that are giving you issues. After you delete them, bring them back from your deleted photos. They should no longer be corrupted.

Step 4) Select the photo that Orient your phone in a different direction than you had it when you first tried accessing your photos then double tap the screen. Then bring them back to the orientation you want and that might do the trick.

These are things that have worked with me for both photos and videos.

This same thing happened to me, I was trying to crop out unwanted borders. Ended up having to crop it little by little instead of all at once. Crop some, then hit done, then go back to edit and crop a little more. Hope this helps!

If you save the video as a new clip, you get your cropped video without it having to “prepare”

restarting my iphone actually worked.