Stupid things on Macintosh
| SYMPTOMS | POSSIBLE CAUSE | POSSIBLE SOLUTION |
| A file on a CD or floppy (or maybe another device) does not open when double-clicked, opened in or dragged onto an application, although the application seems to accept it (it is activated after the attempt to open it). | This must be a finder bug. | Copy the file to the desktop first, and open it from there. |
| You saved a file but its icon does not appear in the finder. | The finder is quite slow in refreshing the display. | A temporary trick is to select the finder, make a new folder and delete it immediately, eg using apple-N and apple-backspace keys, to force a refresh. Also check the finder speed issue below. |
| The machine is becoming slow: applications start quite long after clicking on, after saving new files on the desktop seems to lock the machine for a few seconds, etc. | Trash can holds a large number (>2000) of files. | Empty trash. Once you know this trick, you will notice this phenomenon earlier and the 'large number' treshold will drop steadily! |
| Overall performance is slow. Quicktime music plays half speed and sounds as if modulated on and off with 10Hz. | You reduced processor speed | Turn off "Reduce processor speed" in the energy saver under "advanced settings" |
| Your system goes into sleep mode very slow (>10 seconds, while 2 seconds is possible) |
On powerbook 3400: you run a system higher than OS8.0. With OS8.0 my system slept within 3 seconds while I could not get it sleep fast with OS8.1 or OS8.5. On G3 powerbook: if you are running Mathematica 2.X. see below. |
On 3400: Install OS8.0 On G3: Either quit Mathematica 2.X before going into sleep, or install Mathematica 4.0. |
| The system comes out of sleep mode very slow (15 seconds or more, while 5 seconds is possible) and sometimes even crashes (G3). I have seen OS9 coming out of sleep mode in 1 second (not on a powerbook), but OS9 has other problems on powerbooks... (Maybe this is better with OS9.1, I did not try). |
On powerbook 3400: as above. On G3 powerbook I saw two causes: 1. Mathematics 2.X often dies when the system comes out of sleep. This did not happen with my 3400 powerbook, so this probably is a problem between OS8.6 and Mathematica 2. You have Appletalk on but no cables connected. This does not cause crashes, but Appletalk seems to have very long timeout times. | see above. You can use the location manager to disable Appletalk, but of course this assumes you set the new location before you put your system into sleep... |
| G3 powerbook usually comes out of sleep mode in 8 seconds, sometimes in 10 seconds, but sometimes in 6 or even 5 seconds | The wakeup time seems to depend on the active application (the one indicated in the top right of your screen). If the finder is the active app, the first time you come out of sleep mode usually takes 10 seconds, the subsequent wakeups only 8 seconds. This seems to be related to remounting of the file system if the application uses them. For example, if you have the Quicktime 4 player as active application when going into sleep, the system will wake up in 7 seconds if the player has no music file open (either playing or not), while if it has no file open (eg, all windows closed) the system wakes after 5 seconds. | Before going into sleep, select an application that has no open files. |
| System does not start up anymore, even from other partitions with a copy of the OS (I usually have 6 partitions, 4 with a scratch copy of the OS to test public domain stuff and games). Without extensions the system may start up normally or fail terribly (in the extreme case only a repeated DOS-like text message, even without proper line feeds). | Your PRAM probably has been crashed. This may be caused by installing buggy software (eg, Rhapsody on a powerbook 3400) or just without any obvious reason. | Keep command-option-P-R pressed while booting and keep it depressed for some time, until you hear the reboot sound again. |
| OS8.6 is unstable: system locks up when trying to reboot; finder crashes and system locks when coming out of sleep mode; applications crash unexpectedly. | You use Mac OS ROM version 1.6 (in your system folder). | Reinstall OS ROM version 1.4. Although the MacOS install CD recommends to replace it with version 1.6, there seem to be bugs in it. |
| There is not enough memory to start the application, although the finder indicates that there is ample space left | Memory management has always been very bad on Macintosh systems. Although I never read some apple stuff about this, the many many occurences of this error I saw have convinced me that memory can only be released in the reverse order of allocation. | Only quitting the active program(s) that you started last can resolve the problem. If some data was allocated by the OS lately you may even have to reboot your system. |
| Quicktime 4 crashes when you try to set a text track as a chapter track. After clicking OK on the 'set chapter owner track' window, Quicktime freezes a few seconds and then just quits. | This seems related to the kind of video you try to link with a text track. I had this failure with a sorenson-compressed video but not with a DV-PAL file. | No solution yet. |
| Netscape 4.51 crashes when a quicktime 4 video is playing in its window and you close the window. After closing the window the video continues for a while (you can hear the audio) and then the machine locks up. | It seems Netscape forgets to stop the player before closing the window. | Stop the video before closing the window. |
| Netscape 4.79 shows sometimes spaces at unexpected positions, or shows a page incorrectly. In rare cases the entire page fails to show. | Sometimes a blank space is inserted in the received file, before evaluating the html code. This space seems to be placed always at the same position. If it happens to come in plain text, you will just see an extra space misplaced in the text. But if it happens to get into html directives, such as <href=".."> becoming <a h ref="...">, the link will fail. If it happens to come into a frame or script directive the entire page may fail to show. | Check the page in Netscape before publishing. |
| Monitors and Sound control panel fails with a message 'There is not enough memory available ....' although the largest unused block (Apple menu/about this computer) is very large. Even quitting all applications does not help. Applications (eg, word, photoshop) start without problems. | It seems some system memory is full. This problem can be reproduced easily by opening a large video in quicktime 5, copying a part, opening a new player and pasting the part in. | Reboot the system |
| When asking to sleep, the PB comes with stupid questions, such as "There are files open on one or more shared disks" or "do you want to update location". | No idea why this should happen. If you just close the laptop this does not occur (luckily). | The only solution I know is to re-install a (backup of a) properly working system. |
| An attached microphone is extremely noisy. | You have the power adapter attached. This is very near to the microphone plug and it is a switched power supply which causes extreme electromagnetic junk. | Unplug the power adapter from the mains socket. |
| You don't have the euro sign in your fonts | You are using OS8.1 or lower | Copy the fonts required from OS8.5 and read the next problem |
| Ghostview gives an "illegal font" warning when using OS8.5 fonts | The problem is caused by a data field in the font. The first 4 bytes of the sfnt datafield of the font contain "true" instead of "00010000". | If you have ResEdit, you can change this field into its appropriate value. |
| Adobe premiere exports only audio, while the video frames are all black. Export of a single frame also results in a black frame. | You need to update your ATI video driver. | see http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/ Apple_Software_Updates/MultiCountry/ Macintosh/Display_and_Peripheral/ATI/ ATI_Video_SW_Update_1.0.smi.bin |
| Export video to firewire with Adobe Premiere 5.1 (playback) seems to run irregular: audio falters, and apparently frames are duplicated. (I have an orangemicro firewire PCMCIA card). | Maybe your harddisc is too slow, or there is PCI bus saturation. On my 366MHz PB this seems to happen always when I use the internal HD, although unvisible (but still measurable) if the HD is not fragmented. | Use a fast external SCSI disk. |
| When building a video from a large sequence of tiff images, premiere 5.1 export of video fails at tiff frame 771 or 772, although the tiffs are all right. Sometimes a few frames around 770 are dropped out of the timeline. Some frames may be exported mangled, for instance a few frames may contain only noise or be shifted to the right, with noise inserted at the left. | Premiere seems unable to handle more than 770 separate images. This probably depends on the memory allocated to premiere (33Mb in my case). | Build parts of the video separately. For instance, build frame 0-499 into a 'part1' file and frame 500-999 into a 'part2' file, and then join those parts. Quit premiere after building each part, or the problem will occur anyway. |
| When opening a movie in premiere the message appears 'The application"Adobe Premiere 6.0" has unexpectedly quit, because an error of type 1 occured.' | This seems a bug in premiere. It occurs often when premiere was already open, and a previous session was just closed. | Restart Premiere. No computer restart seems necessary. |
| When using 'export clip/save for web' from Premiere 6.0 and selecting the option, you get the message 'There was a problem trying to launch Cleaner. Please check your configuration' | You moved Cleaner to another directory. | Make a new alias to Cleaner in the directory 'Extensions/Cleaner Support'. The file should have the name 'Cleaner 5 EZ Target' and replaces the old, invalid alias. |
| You changed pictures but Netscape 4.03 (and higher?) still uses the old pictures | Pictures stay in the cache, even after an explicit request to "clear cache" in the preferences menu. | Quit and restart Netscape. |
| The Netscape feedback agent crashes Netscape (and often the rest of the system) | Agent is unstable | Remove the "Talkback" folder from the Netscape folder on your harddisc. |
| In Netscape 4.5 mail, Apple-S does not work. | This is caused by strange, nonstandard assignment of shortcuts in Netscape. Apple-S is shortcut for 'Save Draft, whatever that may be. There is NO shortcut for save. | You can change the shortcuts with resedit. You need to edit the 'mctb' menu, "Mail Compose File". Go to the "Save As" submenu, add 'S' to the shortcut of the "File" menu-item, remove the S from the other menu-items in this submenu. Strangely that this changes only the shortcut for the incoming messages, not for emails written in the editor. |
| You have a table with multiple columns, and pictures with "width=100%" in the cells. The images are scaled at full-page size instead of full-column size when the page is opened, and scaled at column-size only after the window is resized. | Bug in Netscape? It is not clear whether this is proper use of html. In Microsoft Internet Explorer this does not work properly either, but resizing does not help there. |
I recommend to get the pictures out of the table: <img src="a.jpg" width="49%"> <img src="b.jpg" width="49%"> <br> <table > table for figure texts </table > Alternatively, you can add a javascript to the page, automatically resizing the page (makes it 1 pixel wider): <script\> <!-- window.resizeBy(0,1) //--> </script> NOTE: This does not work OK in Microsoft Internet Explorer. |
| Within HTML there is no direct way to make the fontsize depend on the width of the viewing window. | Fontsizing can be done automatically when JavaScript is available | See the source code of for instance my helipages to get an idea how to do this. |
| Javascript seems to have inconsistent effects in Netscape and Internet Explorer. | The various browsers all have different ideas about when a script should be executed and about what is cached. For instance, some browsers seem to evaluate the script only once, and then store the 'evaluated' page into the cache. Other browsers evaluate after a (re)load but not after a windows resize. Again others give do evaluate after a resize but give the incorrect value for the window width at that time. | I don't know (yet?) how to handle this in a nice way. My current font sizing script is an inbetween solution, working approximately right in hopefully most cases. |
| You made a custom icon for some data or application. The icon you made in Photoshop changes when pasted into the finder info. | White changes to transparent when using cut/paste from Photoshop (RGB mode). Only white surrounded with a darker border is copied as white. Some fill action seems to be done starting at the border of the object. | Use ResEdit to explicitly paste both the icon and its mask to the appropriate fields |
| An icon moved off the desktop, so that you cannot reach or see it anymmore | The icon had a long name, and you dragged it holding its name and the icon (but not its name) went off the desktop. Then you renamed the file into a short name. | Try to the find the icon with the find program of the finder. Or click on the desktop and select 'Clean up' from the View menu. |
| This one took me several days to find: why does the Powerbook G3 not work if I have only an external keyboard and monitor attached to it, and press the power button on the keyboard? Actually, it seems to be turning on and off all the time - the speaker makes a clicking noise. | Probably this is a software bug, but on some obscure place in the apple technical info library I found that "Display closed operation while running on battery power is not supported." | Keep the display (slightly) open; select synchronous mode in the monitors & sound control panel; turn the LCD brightness to 0 with the brightness buttons on the powerbook keyboard. Unfortunately (parts of) windows and the mouse arrow may become unvisible when they get on the LCD display. |
| The monitors & sound control panel does not give the option for resolution X or refresh rate R, although the monitor and display card both are capable for that. For example, the G3 bronze can show 1024x768 at 85 Hz, and I have been using it. But on some monitors this option is not available, although the monitor is capable of that rate. | In spite of several attempts of me to get this answered via discussion groups and via apple, I don't know yet. I came to the conclusion that there must be some communication between the monitor and computer, where the monitor tells the computer what it is capable of. Apparently some monitors don't tell the computer properly what they can. |
Start/wake up the computer with a monitor attached that gives you the option to select the refresh rate and resolution you want, then hotplug to the target monitor. If more people would complain about this at apple, they might develop a bug fix... Maybe it is possible to hack the "Display preferences" file with ResEdit. The resolution is in it (did not yet try to change), I did not find the refresh rate. If anyone has details about this, please contact me. |
| The display speed decreases significantly when a second monitor is attached to the G3 bronze. | The computer updates the displays sequentially. | Use only one display when you need high refresh rates. I was told (thanks Jean) that using the same number of colors in all displays also helps. |
| When a second monitor is attached to the G3 bronze and the system is awaken from sleep or started up, the system goes into dual-screen mode or mirror mode while you want to use only the external monitor. | The system notices that the laptop is open and therefore goes in dualscreen mode. | Keep the display closed when waking up the computer (using an external keyboard), or immediately close the display after pressing the power button. You can open the computer again once it is fully awake. |
| Display shows "no signal" | You turned on the computer without the monitor cable connected. | Put computer in sleep and wake it up again. |
| A real disturbing bug on the G3 powerbook, related to the previous two: an attached monitor (or in my case - video projector - yes just at the moment my presentation started!) displays only noise or does not show anything. All current monitors show "no signal" when there is no signal on the input (see above), so noise typically indicates something else is wrong. | The monitor cannot handle the resolution and/or refresh rate provided by the computer. Unfortunately you can never reach the monitors & sound control panel belonging to the ill-behaving display, as it is displayed on the ill-behaving display itself.... (why don't they have a FORCE-TO 640x480 button??) | Don't put your computer to sleep, but just pull out the monitor, and attach another monitor, one that can display the mode the display is in. Select a lower resolution & refresh rate. Then reconnect the first monitor. |
| Equation editor cannot be started up from Word 5.1 after Office98 has been installed. Actually the equation editor is launched, and running in the background, but after that you get a message from word "This object editor is not currently available". If you try a second time, you get "Word cannot locate the server for 'Equation' objects". The equation editor in the background can be used for editing equations, although the button layout and info rulers are in the OS8.6 style now (they used to be in OS7.6 style or so). You can even tear off the formula bar! | Office98 mangles system files. |
A quick solution is to start up the equation editor by hand (it is in the word5.1 directory, in the folder "Word commands") before using it from Word. A better solution is to save the "System Folder/System" folder before installing and running Office98, and to restore the original after that (Thanks to Frits Post for this one. Not yet tried myself). |
| If Word5.1 is the active application, G3 Bronze Laptop often freezes after pressing one of the LCD brightness buttons. | Maybe Word5.1 tries to handle this keystroke - as if F1 or F2 is pressed? This could be related to conflicts with Office98 extensions - see the problems with the equation editor above. | The laptop will 'unfreeze' after about a minute. In the meanwhile you still can type, but your typings stay in the keyboard buffer until unfreeze. To avoid this, unselect word before changing LCD brightness. |
| Printing stops halfway document when printed from Word2001. | Some multitasking bug in Word? | Select printer monitor. |
| Page is clipped at the borders, where text disappears in the printed version Word2001. | The document is not formatted for your printer paper size, and neither File/page setup nor Format/Document is working properly. | Go to the Format/Document dialog, select Margins tab and then select "Whole document" under the 'Apply to' field. Select the Layout tab and also select "Whole document" at its 'Apply to' field. (without selecting this, 'Page Setup' button may work only on part of the document!). Then select the'Page Setup' button and choose the printer's page size. |
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Unresolved Word2001 problems (1) Images are downsampled to very poor resolution when document is printed to file from Word2001. For instance an image of 800x1100 pixels, 8cm wide (250dpi) prints as 180 pixels wide (56dpi). (2) When SAVING from Word2001 as Word5.1 file, error occurs "There was an error reading from the file". | No idea. Microsoft even seems not to support Word2001 - can't find it on their webpage.... | Use Word5.1. |
| Powerbook G3 Power button on external USB keyboard does not work while in Word5.1. | ??? | Click on the finder. |
| Word 5.1 selected fragment sometimes becomes corrupted - it disappears, or becomes unreachable with the cursor. When typing the text re-appears, but underlined with dashed line. | This always occurs when a second document has been opened and viewed | Avoid having a part selected when opening a second document. If this happens, delete the garbled part and retype it. The rest of the document usually is intact. |
| Distiller 4 crashes if fonts are included in postscript file. | There seems to be a problem with Type 42 fonts | Select 'never generate Type 42 format' in the Font settings of the print menu. |
| Distiller 4 mangles some bitmap pictures. | Distiller apparently cannot handle transparent bitmaps; transparent areas are filled with trash by Distiller. | Don't use transparency in bitmaps. Either convert to a vector image or merge transparent parts together in another program before generating the postscript file for distiller. |
| Distiller 4 does not accept and can not open a postscript file. | The file type is unacceptable. | Open text in text editor and save again as plain text. Using ResEdit to change the file type to TEXT should work also. |
| Acrobat 4 "capture server cannot be launched". | This happens usually the second time the capture server is launched within acrobat. | Quit Acrobat and start again... Look at the other bugs in Acrobat to agree that it is the worst product ever by Adobe! |
| Acrobat 4 "capture page" function downsamples unrecognised text parts so much that they become unreadable. | In the macintosh version of Acrobat 4, a button to set the amount of downsampling was left out (did they think this was superfluous???). In spite of the hints in the manuals, the distiller settings are NOT used for this. | I dropped this problem at Adobe on 1/11/99. It now is recognised as a problem but that doesn't help so much. The only way to get slightly higher resolution I know is to convert the picture to a black/white BITMAP (not graylevel!) at say 300 or 400DPI. The default downsampling for black/white images is somewhat lower than the downsampling for graylevel images. However, you now have to convert pictures to bitmaps as well, a cumbersome procedure, even in photoshop. |
| Pages printed or exported from acrobat 4.0 become grayscale while the original has colors. | ? | Use 'export/postscript or eps' and select level 2 postscript. |
| EPS pictures with transparency, exported from Illustrator 9, are converted to bitmaps instead of the original vector objects. | The slider under the menu File/Document Setup/Transparency is not completely to the right. By default Illustrator converts complex image parts to bitmaps. | Put the slider completely to the right. If problem persists check the issue below. |
| In Illustrator 9, Grayscale pictures with transparency are converted into an RGB image when exported. | This seems a small bug in the 'Flatten Transparency' function. | Select only the parts that should be joined into the flattened bitmap, and use the Object/Flatten Transparency function from the menu to convert transparent parts into bitmaps manually. Remember that flattening will disable editing of the flattened parts, so don't save it over your original after flattening. |
| When exporting from Illustrator 9, transparent objects are flattened rather weird, including objects that are overlaid in vector format anyway. | The Flatten Transparency function is not as good as it could be. Sometimes small object order issues can force Illustrator to flatten much larger image parts than you would expect. | See the solution for the previous problem. |
| First character is dropped of text parts when EPS pictures with transparency are exported from Illustrator 9. | No idea | Insert space before first character. |
| Photoshop 4 makes jagged edges on letters in postscript fonts (red A's in your font directory) , while importing postscript files. | ATM is not installed. | Install ATM |
| Mathematica 4.0 crashes when opening file or when output of calculation is large. | The frontend has not enough memory to display the file. It seems to need a multiple of the data size, for example I can open an 800kb file only with the frontend memory set to 25Mb, and edit only with 50Mb. | Allocate more memory to Mathematica 4. Unfortunately older versions don't work properly under MacOS8.6. |
| Mathematica 4 somehow changes pasted text, it removes spaces, etc, when reading or writing files. | In prefs of Mathematica (yes that terribly large mess) there are some options. I had half a day of messing with RTF files before I found out this.... | Change Data Import+Export options/OpenSpecialOptions/ReadingType to ExactResources. |
| Mathematica 4 can not find help files. Even a full reinstall does not help. | This occured after I repartitioned my harddisc and put back the mathematica files from a backup disk. The stored helpfile path probably contains some hard links (to avoid problems if you rename files?). | Throw away the Mathematica folder from the system/preferences directory. |
| Mathematica 4 Kernel stops when you type EndOfFile followed by enter in the editor window. | It seems that the frontend thinks there's coming no more input. | Dont evaluate this term. You can use another term that evaluates to EndOfFile instead. |
| Printing from powerpoint 2001 crashes with 'error -50'. No details, no print output. | ?? | Open and print the slides from powerpoint 98. File formats of PP98 and PP2001 apparently are identical. |
| Netscape Communicator 4.5 starts up with a message that the preference file contains an error; After editing the Netscape Preferences file by hand it works OK, but as soon as you change the preferences within Netscape the error returns. | Some of the preferences are copied from the Internet control panel. | You typed more than 1 line in one of the text fields in the Internet panel (System folder/Control panels). |
| A click is heard a few minutes after you started listening to music. | The energy saver (attempted to) change some system settings, eg the display brightness. This happens automatically when you dont touch the keyboard/mouse for some time. | Change energy saver settings. |
| PGP 6.5.1 asks for random key strokes or mouse movements each time when encrypting files. | The random seed location is set up wrong | The correct location is in System Folder:Preferences:Pretty Good Preferences:PGP random seed. |
| PGP 6.5.1 seems to encrypt a file incorrectly | The file was encrypted only partially, as the disk was full. You DO NOT GET a WARNING for this during encryption, instead all seems ok. | Try to decrypt a file before throwing away the original. Anyway, be sure you have enough HD space. |
| Powerbook G3 sometimes is 'pricky', especially on the sides near the cooling holes. | A design error in the powerbook causes the flat cable from the harddisc to the main board to scratch over a sharp notch on the bottom of the machine. Eventually the protection will wear and the power lines to the HD will short-circuit against the case of the machine. |
Put protective tape on the flat cable, where it touches the square notch designed to keep the HD holder in place. Round off the notches slightly with sanding paper. Apple does not sell these cables separately (service, what's that?). If you don't recognise the symptoms early enough, at some point the Powerbook G3 may spreads smell of burning chips and freezes. Better turn off the machine *immediately* if this happens (I was lucky and quick enough...). Do NOT try the nice 'shutdown', but remove both battery and power adapter quickly. Too bad if you're too slow. |
| In battery-powered mode, the harddisc spins up regularly. | Every change in the battery level indicator (next to the time indicator in the menu bar) will spin up the harddisc. Also, realplayer keeps doing things on the HD, even when it is fully installed on RAM disk....... | Turn off the battery level indicator (Date & Time control panel, clock options). Kill realplayer and use quicktime instead. |
| In VirtualPC, files seem to unpack unproperly. | The standard Alladin Stuffit expander program seems to unpack only part of the files in an archive ,without giving a warning. Maybe this problem is caused by fast-changing sub-standard archives. | Use a program that gives warnings when an error occurs, or make sure you use the same program to zip and un-zip a file. |
| Pressing Apple-Shift-0 simultaneous puts the computer to sleep immediately no matter which application is active. | Some undocumented shortcut? | Dont use this shortcut in an application. |
| A file size is smaller after it was ftp-ed to another machine using Fetch 3.0.3 in binary mode. | Fetch ignores the binary setting if the file is of type TEXT. | Change the type of text files to ???? before using fetch. |
| Fetch 4.0 gives an error "Can't build data connection. Connection refused." halfway the transfer. This is not a firewall problem. Setting Preferences/Firewall/Use passive mode transfers on does not help. | Seems a bug within Fetch4.0 or with some drivers? | Install (and use if necessary) Fetch 3.0.3. The Fetch4.0 problem disappeared after I installed Fetch 3.0.3 so this may be an extension problem. |
| After pressing a key to wake up the laptop and immediately closing the display, OS9.2.2 goes to sleep after wakeup. The LCD goes turns on for a while, which should not happen as the display is closed. It seems neither an energy saver problem nor a PRAM problem. | dont know yet | ??? |
| Frequently, a non-existing (old?) printer is selected and printing from a document results in a 'printer not found' error. | One of the used locations in the location manager uses an obsolete printer setting. | Update the location 'default printer' setting. To remove old printers from the chooser, you can remove the Preferences/Printing Prefs/LaserWriter 8 Prefs file from the System Folder. |
| Entries in the TCP/IP settings are uneditable. | You try to edit the 'Classic' settings or a copy of it. OSX makes these settings according to the OSX settings, and you cant edit them (and copies of them) in OS9. | Copy an editable setting. |
| Cleaner 5 EZ (launched from Premiere 6.0) does not produce acceptable video's. The quality is terrible, and they do not stream properly. | You can change many things by editing the XML files of Cleaner. However it is a lot of work and has little added value. | I recommend to use the Quicktime Pro 'export' option to make streaming video. Only in special cases Cleaner may give added value. It *is* useful to experiment with Cleaner as its informative output window helps you finding the bad-compressing areas in your video and what may be the cause. |
| Quicktime exported video does not stream properly, although you set up the export options for streaming. | There seems to be a bug in the quicktime export. | Open the file that Quicktime created, and save as self-contained movie. This copy should stream properly. |
| Quicktime 'dust and scratches/dust and film fading' filter seems not to work. | You have to set extreme amounts of dust before anything visible happens. The scratch and hair density seems much more eager to mangle your video. | Move the dust density to at least 46 (on a scale of 50!). If you need at least some dust on every frame (eg, to circumvent the sorenson still frame problem mentioned below), values of 48 or 49 may be needed. |
| Video encoded with Sorenson shows mangled frames and/or blank frames (usually in greenish color). Audio continues unaffected. | It seems the Sorenson coder sometimes incorrectly codes still images when they last longer than a second or so. Maybe Sorenson is changing frame rates on the fly, to be smart... | The only solution I got for this is to add some noise to still images, forcing Sorenson to update the frames. You can use the Quicktime effects/film noise (also see my note on troubleshooting this effect). |