Quicktime filename limited to 55 characters?

NickHope wrote on 3/20/2010, 10:39 PM

Vegas Pro 8.0c is not letting me render Quicktime files with file names longer than 55 characters. It gives me the error message: "An error occurred while creating the file.... The file name is not valid".

I have no idea why this is and it is inconvenient because I have Proxy Stream batch jobs that are hanging in the middle of the night when they encounter one of the small percentage of my files that has a file name longer than 55 characters.

Other formats can be rendered with longer file names, and if I rename the .mov file outside of Vegas, it can be brought into a project without problems.

Are others seeing this same behaviour?

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 3/20/2010, 11:17 PM

I thought the limit (of quicktime) was 63 characters.

You could also be running into a Windows pathname limit. I think the total path + filename i NTFS is limited to 255 characters.

Neither of these figures are necessarily current information so take it all with a grain of salt.

Rob Mack

NickHope wrote on 3/20/2010, 11:59 PM

It doesn't seem to be a Windows limit. I can create .mov files in MPEG Streamclip on my PC with longer file names. As far as I can tell, this is a Vegas bug.

rmack350 wrote on 3/21/2010, 8:50 PM

You and I would be doing the same internet searches on this, so I'm sure I couldn't come up with a better answer.

55 is not the number that comes up for quicktime filename limits. I think it's more like 63. One other thing I ran across was spaces in filenames being encoded as %20. If that were the case then I'd predict 8 spaces in your file name. That could conceivably be a vegas bug, I suppose, or Quicktime.

The basic remedy is to create shorter names. This problem you're having is something I'm also in danger of since I take filenames directly from the description field of shoot logs.

Good luck.

Rob Mack