Incompatible Video Files (Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey)

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Level 2

216 points

Incompatible Video Files (Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey)

Apple is warning of a future disaster of its own making, yet it fails to help us avoid it.

About incompatible media in Final Cut Pro

With recent Final Cut Pro updates, Apple warns that you must retain a Mojave startup drive forever, because that is the last version of macOS that will be able to convert incompatible video files.

"Before you upgrade to macOS Catalina, you can use Final Cut Pro to detect and convert all incompatible media files so they’ll be compatible with future versions of macOS."

There are two problems with this:

To "use Final Cut Pro to detect and convert", we must open every FCP project we have ever created, one at a time. That's just thoughtless.
This "solution" does nothing for incompatible media that we might need one day. If it's not in a project today, it might be tomorrow. And then it's too late.

Is anyone aware of a utility or app that will scan drives for this new incompatibility, to save hours of work?

Thanks.

Posted on Jul 12, 2021 10:42 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

terryb

Level 4

2,265 points

Jul 12, 2021 1:15 PM in response to Al Hatch

I just tried a Finder level Find and chose Kind is Movie. It quickly found thousands of files: WMV, DV, MPEG, MPEG-2 Transport Stream, MXF, AVI, 3GPP, MP4 and MOVs. That might give you at least a head start on identifying media that might need to be converted.

Alternatively, although it still wouldn't help with automatic scanning, you could create a Mojave virtual machine with the free VirtualBox and launch it if/when you need to convert something. You'd need to be comfortable working in the Terminal to initially set it up. https://github.com/AlexanderWillner/runMacOSinVirtualBox

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Answer 2

fox_m

Level 6

12,322 points

Jul 12, 2021 11:12 AM in response to Al Hatch

There's software like Smart Converter Pro 3 on the App store. It can do batch processing and folder monitoring. In general, it only converts what it has to, so if the actual video frame data doesn't need to be affected, it will be left alone. In this case, conversions are very fast. You start getting into trouble when software has to re-encode video. Shop around though. You might find better.

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Answer 3

terryb

Level 4

2,265 points

Jul 12, 2021 11:19 AM in response to Al Hatch

Use a 3rd party conversion app like Handbrake (free) if you end up needing to access old, unsupported media? It uses ffmpeg under the hood and can convert many different media types.

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