Q: Where are QuickTime Player's temp files stored?

Look for a very large .mov file (with an appropriate date) in /private/var/folders/[randomly named subfolder]/[randomly named subfolder]/-Tmp-/TemporaryItems/.  It's where Snow Leopard (and later OS, as far as I know) puts temp files created in the preparation of a QT screen recording. If you do find this large .mov file, COPY it to the Desktop.  Under normal conditions, these temp files get deleted automatically when the screen recording process completes; however, when the process fails to finish properly, sometimes these temp files linger.

QT probably won't be able to open the temp .mov file.  Sometimes VLC can.  If not, there are pricey video recovery services that may be able to extract the video from the data stream in the .mov.  Here are two:

http://aeroquartet.com/

http://www.grauonline.de/cmsimple2_6/en/?Solutions:HD_Video_Repair_Utility

Good luck.

Just to help others, who like me stumbles upon this thread: I had a similar problem with a screen recording, and found the original file in $HOME/Library/Containers/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX/Data/Library/Autosave Information/Unsaved QuickTime Player Document.qtpxcomposition/Screen\ Recording.mov

This .mov file, however, is not a regular QT movie file, but a container which contains the real .mov file along with some meta information. The container can be opened with Finder (direct Finder to the location and control-click on the file to open the container).

Hope it helps someone else :-)

Thank you SOOOOOOOOOO much!  I had just recorded a video for about 4 hours and did not save.  After following your instructions, I safely recovered the file! This is extremely helpful to me as this has happened before and could possibly happen again.  Thanks again!

Spot on  Jacand

I left quickTime recording and ended up with a 30G recording  of a static desktop.  I knew a big useless file was there somewhere but I couldn't find it.  Your  hint solved the problem in 30 seconds.  Thanks

Im trying to recover a video. I was recording and the battery died. It didnt save on the dekstop like it normally does. I tried Jacands suggestions by going to Library/Containers/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX/Data/Library/Autosave Information/Unsaved QuickTime Player Document.qtpxcomposition/Screen\ Recording.mov

However, there is nothing in the Autosave Information folder. Any ideas?

HI

I just recorded a 2 hours conversation and then, as I was saving the file,  quicktime crashed.

So I did a search (command F) for:  any file - created today  - including all files, visible and invisible. I got a lot of results but I ordered them by time and I found the recording by looking at the time when I started it. (around 7.pm)

It was called Unsaved QuickTime Player Document.qtpxcomposition

then i moved it on the desktop.

Hope it helps.

This Quicktime behaviour has changed between OSX 10.7 and 10.8. The data files are now "sandboxed".

This article, while it does have a rather long preamble (skip to the second screenshot), also explains that Time Machine will attempt (if it has the time and free space) to preserve the temporary file. If Quicktime essentially quits without saving, this might help some people if the file is not enormous. On the other hand, it might be a folder to exclude if you do not want Time Machine dealing with temp files you know will be very large.

http://www.macstories.net/news/recovering-a-lost-quicktime-recording/

It makes sense that if the folder is empty you no longer have a file to preserve, but at least now we know where to target an undelete utility.

I inadvertently made a very large screen recording (19.1 GB) which I cannot find anywhere on my machine, including the path your referreed to. 'Autosafe Information/ is empty. Yet, my disk space is reduced by by 20 GB, so the recording must be somewhere on the disk. I run Mavericks (10.9) on an MBP (early 2011).

Any help will be much appreciated.

thank you very much!

Hi...stumbled upon this from a google search.

I'm on latest version of OS X El Capitan w/ latest Quicktime.

I typically use Quicktime for doing screen recordings and doing webcam recordings to share online.

The problem here is that my Mac only has a 128GB SSD, and I generally try to keep at least 30GB of free space.

You can see how this can be an issue.

So there MUST be a way to change the location where Quicktime is storing it's temporary recordings?

Does anyone have any ideas?  Maybe you can modify it with a .plist?

Otherwise I'd say this is a downright horrible design...I mean really who wants to have 50GB+ uncompressed .MOV files on their main hard drive anyway?

Not to mention if your Mac IS using an SSD, constantly writing huge multiple GB cache files and then deleting them when the movie gets compressed is a very easy and fast way to destroy your SSD and make it super slow and prone to write errors!

I've already noticed a 50 MB/s drop in write speeds.

If there is no way to change the location, perhaps someone can recommend a better program that I can use to capture from a USB webcam / from the screen as well, that I can tell the program to store the temporary files on an external USB 3 drive?  I have so much external storage too, hence the reason why I only got a 128GB SSD with this Mac...I felt like I didn't need any more internal space because I like to keep my media files off the main drive anyway!  What a big mistake lol.

That app ScreenFlow is great but it's $100.00...

I'm all for supporting good developers and all but that is a bit obscene.

I don't do commercial videos these are just for my own personal use and sometimes I upload covers to YouTube.

So I guess that option is out...

Back to Quicktime...Maybe I could find the temp folder, delete it, create a new one that is actually an alias to a location on a USB3 drive?

Would that work?