Photo booth videos are saving as corrupted/blank files.

UPDATE--

I contacted Apple support both over chat and over phone (after a long conversation over chat they told me this issue could only be resolved over phone, but then the first person who called me back actually did not know the issue at all and said they needed to transfer me to a different department...such a mess!).

After the end, they told me there's no way they could retrieve the content of such a corrupted file, and the only way I could do is to not use Photo Booth, but use QuickTime Player to record videos. They also said the engineers were aware of this issue and they might have an update....But my important video is gone and there is no solution at all on that...

upgrade to monterey 12.4 and it should work. a new macbook air wasn't able to film on photobooth. it works now after upgrading to 12.4

that said, the webcam on the 2020 macbook air is terrible. less than 1megapixel.

Solutions that worked for me but I did not proceed because they required payment: https://fix.video/ or https://www.stellarinfo.com/disk-recovery/video-repair.php.

Free solution that ended up successfully working for me: Untrunc. (See also this Reddit thread.)

I still think Apple should come out with an actual fix.

For most video repair tools you will need another video recorded on the same microphone and camera, length of at least a minute seems recommended. Though there's no guarantee you will get the whole video back, it seems at the point of corruption most data is lost after that so I only recovered 25 mins of a 45 min video.

If you are comfortable with the command line, there is a free tool that I used to recover the video. Just make sure to provide the FF_VER=3.3.9 argument otherwise it did not work for me. This gave me the same result as any video repair site did without the price. The output video may appear to be choppy when played in QuickTime but in other players (like VLC) it was fine. Also the audio desynced at times on mine but that might just be bad luck.

Give this a try: boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and test to see if the problem persists. Reboot normally and test again.

NOTE: Safe Mode boot can take up to 3 - 5 minutes as it's doing the following; 

• Verifies your startup disk and attempts to repair directory issues, if needed

• Loads only required kernel extensions (prevents 3rd party kernel/extensions from loading)

• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically

• Disables user-installed fonts 

• Deletes font caches, kernel cache, and other system cache files

Update to 12.4 , mine works now

Where are the movies being saved? I found them in the Photo Booth Library in my Pictures folder. I had to Control (right) - click on the library and select Show Contents from the contextual menu. I copied a test movie that I made and it played with Quicktime Player.

Try using the free app VLC to play the movie file. If it works you can then covert it to the .m4v format with VLC.

Have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

I just started to record in Quick Time Player and all good

I had this very same issue after upgrading to Monterey. Those recordings were related to my new project which after saving them turned out to be of 00:00 time in an unplayable format of MOV.

I then repaired the videos using a video repair tool that cost me some extra bucks but in the end, I was able to repair them and used them significantly in a playable format.

@Apple you need to resolve this bug from Photobooth running on OS Monterey!

Hello Itsbritttt,

Thank you for participating in the Apple Support Communities! We understand that videos recorded in Photo Booth aren't saving after upgrading to macOS Monterey.

Are you using the built-in camera on your Mac or an external camera on your Mac to record the video? If you're using an external camera, does the same behavior occur if you switch to the built-in camera?

Take a photo or record a video in Photo Booth on Mac - Apple Support

Could you also tell us the format for the videos that won't play? Can you record and playback video in any other apps?

Take care.

I’m having the same problem since upgrading to Monterey

I’ve also completely reformatted the MacBook Pro and immediately started recording video and same issue whether it’s 10 minutes or an hour after I press stop button the video shows as 0:00 and around 25 megabytes

Hi I‘ve got a brandnew Macbook Air M1 and I get the same error. In case I capture a video that exceed 2:30 or 3:00 the video stream will be broken. that got nothing to do with a corrupt disk, it‘s quite obvious that with so many people having that bug Photobooth must be broken.

Please fix it. Cheers, Alex

So I've been seeing this with some movies that I've recorded, and I opened them up to take a look at them.

Using Synalyze It! Pro I have found that the corrupt files look like this:

Note the 'qt ' atom and the 0 value for the 'wide' atom.

My good (usually much shorter) files look like this:

Note that they have an `mp42` atom instead.

Both of these are recorded using the same process (in my case recording an iOS simulator using simctl). I don't know why the format difference. I can repair the corrupt ones sometimes using external services.

update: Apple engineering is aware.

An update came out last week (today's date is April 4, 20220).

So I will apply that update and then retest.

The problem is of course I don't yet have a reliable reproduction case, so I don't expect to know if the update was the fix or if this is an infrequent bug.

Having said that Apple support said that if the issue isn't resolved after the update then they're going to want more information to look into this issue further.

So, here is how you can help: if you have updated to Monterrey 12.3.1 and you still see this problem can you please reply to this posting and that way Apple engineering will see the information.

Cheers.

I am experiencing the same problem. I'm making an educated guess that the security features with screen lock are causing a write error. I have tried disabling the screen lock feature and it seems to work, but wanted to toss this hypothesis out there to see if anyone else who's having this issue can replicate this pattern.

Obviously the only way to fix this is to wait for a new patch because i don't want to have to disable this every time and I certainly don't want to leave my system unprotected. Hopefully this gives some of the developers some place to look.