Invalid public movie atom was found in movie.

Whew, I wonder if you have Perian installed, most of what I read has to do ith missing codecs it seems.

Have you tried VLC Player or maybe Mplayer on them?

Your files are not corrupted, this is an issue with the recent quicktime software upgrade. Sorry I'm missing your Saturday deadline by a couple weeks, but if you want to downgrade and get it fixed, you need to download Pacifist and then follow these directions: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/using_pacifist_to_downgrade_quicktime .html

This kind of upgrade error from Apple is pretty terrible, and this issue looks like it crops up every couple years or so, but it took a hefty amount of internet sifting to figure out what was going on. Hope this helps.

I just installed the Security Update 2011-006 and now all of my QT files that were captured on Canon XH-A1 with a Focus FS-CF Pro DTE recorder have this problem. Either this is the issue or the iTunes 10.5 update, i upgraded both on one machine and files have invalid public movie atoms, open them on another machine without said upgrades no problems.

Hey Probasco,

My dad had a very similar problem to what you described today. He did this weeks updates this morning to his snow leopard mac tower with some huge processor stats on it. He has terabytes of .mov footage that he shoots with his JVC HD cam (very professional looking) and captures with a 5 or so year old looking little HD drive attached to the camera with firewire 400. Anyways, this morning I was managing some of his media throughout a handful of external and internal HD's when I starting seeing a General Error in FCP. It had no numbers or anything just "General Error." After many experiments and scaring my dad half to death thinking his HD's were possibly corrupted (this problem did have that behavior so I couldn't rule it out quite yet), the solution has finally surfaced.

Fortunately, I have access to a plethora of macs running different versions of OS's even as different as just a month ago Snow Leop and Lion. So now after spending the day on that project and a free dinner from my pops I can share the solution in case this weeks update has caused some mayhem in yours or others computer environment.

What you'll need: [2 system folders: Macintosh HD/System/Library/Components

Macintosh HD/System/Library/Quicktime ]

I took both of those folders from the Snow Leopard iMac that still supports all of his projects and footage (last update in September I believe on that one), and put them in the newly updated Mac, well I did it to his MacBook too which he had updated this morning as well. I actually hard deleted the two folders from the new updated computers first and then dragged those 2 folders in.

That's the first part, then restart the computer once or twice and then its back to normal. If I left out any details that you wish to know about or if I was unclear about anything or you want those two **** folders! then feel free to contact me if this forum allows that. This is my first time posting anything in a forum I think or its been awhile.

All the best,

mojotreetop

Oh, after proofreading now that its posted I forgot to give some credit to the guy that it says to give credit to at the end of all of the steps if you follow the link up in dingeaux's post. I did all of what those steps say to do on digitalrebellion.com , but it didn't quite work. It had the right idea though, and I just had to get a little creative on it. I think that I just manually did what Pascifist was attempting to do. So thanks very much for that! I was leaning towards the route of a clean install at the point earlier today when I found this thread, which it appears that that would have been more drastic than necessary. Okay.

I had a similar issue with some ProRes 4444 files from an Arri Alexa. I was editing in FCP and left the project for two weeks or so. When I opened it up again I found nothing would play down except rendered clips. Pulled up the source clip, wouldn't play down without "public movie atom" error.

Obviously something had changed the way Quicktime was reading those files. And in the time I'd been away from the project, I'd updated to iTunes 10.5 and Security Update 2011-006. Rather than messing with a Quicktime downgrade, I did a reformat and reinstall of 10.6, avoiding iTunes 10.5 and Security Updates.

My files now play down without a hitch, no problems at all. I'm back editing in FCP and all is as it was three weeks ago before the updates. Clearly there's an issue with one or both of these updates that needs to be addressed. In the meantime I hope everyone's fix is as easy as mine was.

I'm running 10.6.8 and had the same problem with HDV files not playing after the Security Update 2011-006 for Snow Leopard.

Reinstalling 10.6.3 from the DVD over the current OS fixed the problem with out messing with any of the sofware on the mac.

You can use sofware update to go back to 10.6.8 and update Safari so it works correctly but remember to not install the Security Update 2011-006 for Snow Leopard.

If it's still of interest to anyone (and FWIW), you might want to try to convert the movie with FFMPEGX. Follow the instructions on the download page. When you convert the movie choose H264 (Apple's preferred movie format and the only one that seems to work with QuickTime).

Hope it helps.