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After choosing a file location to save a screen recording, the movie will start to save, then it says "Cannot Open" and nothing is saved. I can retry but it still doesn't. I just saved a video before this. It's on macOS High Sierra. 10.13.1. This same issue is plastered all over the Apple.com help forums but there are no answers.

QuickTime is Version 10.4 (928.5.1) - the version that came with my MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2016).

After the saving progress bar gets to about 1/4, it flashes "cannot open this media may be damaged quicktime" then "Cannot Open"

I'll add a video below to show exactly what

To debug, I did confirm that a 5 second video with voiceover could save. However, a 25 minute video will not. I closed that video and recorded another screen recording for 10 minutes long and same issue. In the past I've been able to record 10-30 minute videos and save. Now it only allows small videos.

enter image description here

Video of what happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBME45Ks3_o

enter image description here

User
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    How much space is left on your hard drive? – daviewales Mar 10 '18 at 22:29
  • @daviewales 100GB – User Mar 10 '18 at 22:38
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    Well it's not that then! – daviewales Mar 11 '18 at 23:04
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    This is a bit of a longshot, but there are a couple of things you can try to isolate issues like this. Try starting in 'Safe Mode', by holding down Shift-S on boot. This disables unnecessary kernel extensions, and a few other things. Then try the screen recording. If it works in Safe Mode, but not in normal mode, then we can start to do some investigation to find the problem. If that doesn't work, try creating a new user account on your Mac, and see if the screen recording works in the other account. – daviewales Mar 11 '18 at 23:12
  • Did you manage to try my answer? – Matt Sephton Mar 20 '18 at 10:21
  • I found that ONE OF POSSIBLY MANY root causes of this issue is **after turning screen recording back on, duplicating and trimming a different unsaved screen recording video.** Workaround: 1) save the video after recording 2) duplicate and save the duplicate 3) trim. This may be very prevalent because A) who wants to save a giant untrimmed screen recording and B) who wants to trim anything without duplicating it first. – John Jun 08 '20 at 18:56

4 Answers4

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Sounds like a permissions problem. If it’s a bug I suspect it will be fixed in a future macOS update. Not much help, I know.

Until then, you have to peek behind the curtain:

  1. Unsaved recordings are stored at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX/Data/Library/Autosave Information/
  2. The file will be called Unsaved QuickTime Player Document.qtpxcomposition, or similar
  3. Show Package Contents on that file
  4. Inside is Screen Recording.mov which you can copy and keep

enter image description here

Matt Sephton
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    I was able to "save" the recording using this trick however whenever I try to open or convert the MOV file from the package it throws errors. I've tried QuickTime, iMovie, VLC, Adobe Media Encoder...while I can play the MOV without issue in Quicktime, I can't use it anywhere without things exploding. This makes me think maybe the reason it couldn't save is that there is something in the file data or the file headers that's gone sideways. – Michael Thompson May 25 '18 at 03:16
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    I've never encountered that before. Can you reproduce it consistently with new, unsaved screen recordings? – Matt Sephton May 25 '18 at 08:20
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    Haven't really tested it or what might've triggered it; pretty salty about it and already spent hours just trying to recover things. I was able to rename the MOV file to use an AVI extension and open the AVI in QuickTime, let it "convert", save as MOV and it worked minus the last ten minutes which are missing video but have audio. I think somehow the video got corrupt, but again haven't tested. – Michael Thompson May 25 '18 at 18:15
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    Thank you so much for the answer. It works great. Saved me a lot of hassle. – user7672 Jul 08 '18 at 04:28
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    Thanks, @MattSephton! You saved me from a certain heart attack. – smozgur Feb 18 '19 at 20:37
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    @MattSephton thank you! You saved my life. QuickTime player never worked so well for me but at least now I can get my recordings from it. I wonder if they will fix this saving issue soon. ( I am on Mac OS Mojave) – Doug Jul 06 '19 at 11:16
  • @MattSephton I don't have a `Containers` folder in my library. Mac OS 10.13.4 High Sierra. I also can't seem to find `com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX`. Would this be anywhere else? – Chris22 Oct 10 '19 at 17:12
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    The file path is very different on my Mac than in this answer. But I was able to get the file. I searched `"com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX"` and found a quicktime `Document` (_icon wasn't a folder though_). I double-clicked that file and saw my `.mov` file in there. I then dragged the `.mov` file onto my desktop and saved it in a folder. This answered it for me. – Chris22 Oct 10 '19 at 17:49
  • @Chris22 would be great if you could post your path – Matt Sephton Oct 10 '19 at 22:40
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    @MattSephton You should be given a million points for this. – Dhawan Gayash Dec 10 '19 at 00:08
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    @LexJacobs exactly as in my answer – Matt Sephton Apr 07 '20 at 21:04
  • @MichaelThompson I had the same issue. But in my 2 hour video, the last 3/4 of video was all gone. Thankfully the video wasn't so important, but it was still a bummer. – adrianmc Jul 04 '20 at 10:57
  • You saved my life dude! Thank you so much, tho the last 10 mins or so was gone :( – Zeyad Shaban Mar 04 '21 at 05:18
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    @MattSephton you are a F&@#*((! hero man. Seriously saved me from just losing 90 minutes of important footage. THANK YOU! – shoke Feb 26 '23 at 17:59
3

Had this situation now, couldn't locate the temporary file in the suggested places - however:

Doing Menus:

File/Move To... - did the trick, to the ~/Documents folder

oyd11
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I've got a friend who had a similar sounding problem. In his case it was Docker could not write to a temporary location. He had tried the permissions repair a couple different ways.

He was able to resolve his problem using a bit of what I call Apple Black Magic which is resetting your NVRAM and resetting your SMC, which seems to have influence over features you would have never thought were associated.

These two seemingly unrelated resets, seems to resolve many IO based bugs.

Jim
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I succeeded to save the file using HandBrake.

As a shortcut I was running the following command in the Terminal to create a simlink into ~/Downloads:

ln ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX/Data/Library/Autosave\ Information/Unsaved\ QuickTime\ Player\ Document.qtpxcomposition/Movie\ Recording.mov ~/Downloads/rec.mov

Then I used HandBrake to create a lower resolution export. The shortcut saves the need to navigate into this complicated original location. When export is finished, the simlink should be deleted (e.g. rm ~/Downloads/rec.mov)

Warning: be careful not to exit QuickTime before you are finishing the export!

ishahak
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