Pro Tools playing back wrong video file?

[nhaudio]

Has anyone ever had an issue with Pro Tools playing back the wrong video files? This is an issue I have never seen before after using Pro Tools since 1999-ish. I have a session with 30 video files (6 spots, with 5 versions of each. The difference in the video file versions for each spot is that each has a different visual logo at the end. All the files are labeled correctly. If I load only one 'logo version' of the spots, all is well. But once I load more in, even though they're all placed in different locations on the timeline, it's swapping which one it plays back. However, if I Bounce to Quicktime, it outputs the CORRECT file (which is great for outputting, but useless when I have clients in the room). Re-starting, re-loading video files, changing the order in which I load them in... nothing seems to help. I'm stumped. Video files are all DNxHD 36 Mb/s. Otherwise the system has been stable. I've done similar versioning sessions before without issue, although this is the first I've had on 2019.5.

System details:
Mac Pro 6,1, 3.5 GHz 6-core, 32 GB RAM
OS 10.14.5
Pro Tools Ultimate 2019.5 with HDX1

[BScout]

Are you using any video playback interfaces (BlackMagic or Aja)"
Are all 30 on 1 video track or 5 video tracks?

[markanthonybr]

What OS are you on? And FYI they’ve released 2019.6 which is full of bug fixes.


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[Tim R.]

Interestingly enough, I had a similar problem recently. A session with 6 different video tracks (alt versions). The Video engine got stuck playing one specific video regardless of which track i had active. Restarting Pro Tools resolved the problem. My Sig is out of date BTW. I'm running on a 2018 Mac Mini with 32Gig ram and the (almost) Latest PTs Ultimate (not the one released yesterday).

[nhaudio]

Thanks for the quick responses... and sorry for the late reply. The Canadian long weekend had me blissfully disconnected while I fed the mosquitos.

I'm not using any video hardware. I have 3 screens connected to the Mac Pro 6,1; screen 1 and 2 (edit and mix) are on Thunderbolt->VGA adapters, and screen 3 (picture) is HDMI. Haven't had any issues with this setup to date.

I initially tried running the different picture versions on different video tracks, but once I ran into trouble, I tried deleting all the tracks and putting the video files all on one video track. This didn't solve it.

Current OS is 10.14.5. I saw 2019.6 came out, so might give that a spin if I get a lull soon.

Restarts didn't solve it for me, despite my best efforts. Every time I load the files back in, they get swapped. There's likely a pattern to it, I just haven't found it yet. Again, if I get a lull soon I'll continue to try and solve it.

[reichman]

Are they all the exact same size and codec? If not, that might cause a problem.

[epm]

I think I may have encountered this.

Is the character length of the full path of any of the video files in the session greater than 128 characters? (Like /Audio/session/video.mov........) I’ve noticed the video engine behaves really odd if you have a a video file that have really long names.

I started seeing it when We started making more sub folders to organize where video files came from, as well as adding time and date suffixes to video files to keep track of when we receive elements.

Shortening the path and or file name fixes it for me.

[monter]

Yeah, I got the same problem since PT 2018 version (in earlier PT 10 there were no such problem).
I guess I found the problem in conversion using ffmpeg.
My solution is to add -metadata parameter with creation date.
For example:

ffmpeg -i INPUT.MOV -vcodec dnxhd -s 1920x1080 -b:v 36M -pix_fmt yuv422p -c:a pcm_s16be -ar 48000 -movflags use_metadata_tags -metadata Creation_Time="UTC 2021-07-07 14:09:26" OUTPUT.MOV

Look at the attachement - I used MediaInfo to check if it worked.

Let me know if this modification works for you.

P.S. You can for example modificate Marco Bernardo script (MB_Convert2DNxHD).

[BobbyDazzler]

I used to have this exact problem for years on my mac across multiple PT versions.
I haven't encountered it since going to PC.
It just wouldn't change video tracks, like it was stuck in some sort of hard cache with the original video. I had to restart every time, total PITA.
I also had the odd occasion where it wouldn't playback a video file unless I trimmed a few frames off the start.