Problem transfering videos from old channel to new...

[Lomitus]

Greetings one and all!

Alrighty...please bear with me here as I (try to) explain what's going on... Because of a fairly recent move (my family relocated) that involved going to a new ISP and new email account obviously, as well as a harddrive crash and a few other problems, I no longer have the password to access my old Youtube channel or the old email account....(NOT looking to reset passwords or anything like that...will explain in a bit). As such, I have setup a new channel and I'm trying to move my videos...mostly my animation work and some work I've done as a musician, to the new channel which I will be linking to from the new online portfolio I'm putting together (I'm a digital artist and student animator among other things). The problem is that half the videos seem to be corrupted in some way....lemme explain what I'm doing here.

In short, I'm using "save from dot net" to download my own videos (and I've tried a couple of similar online utilities), so that I can re-upload them to the new channel...because of the aforementioned harddrive crash, I've lost the originals on many of these (long story there in and of itself), so I'd like to have copies on the new harddrive regardless. So far about half the videos have been fine....able to download them to my pc, they play and re-upload to the new channel with no problem at all (which is what I would have expected). The other half however.....they appear to be intact and they play fine on YT, however when I tried to upload them, the upload craps out during "processing"...I just get a wonderfully generic error saying "Can't process video". I have also discovered that while these are being saved as MP4's...essentially a Quicktime format...these specific videos will not play in Quicktime (I just get a blank white screen)...the others do, but these do not, HOWEVER, for some reason, they will play in Media Player Classic???!!!? That's possibly the weirdest part. A great many of these videos were created within weeks, if not days or even hours of each other (many of the animations at least), with most, if not all using the same render setting and such when they were created, so I don't understand why SOME are fine, but others aren't. Likewise, since they were downloaded straight from Youtube, I don't understand why some of them won't "process"...while others will - seems like a hell of a glitch here.

I suspect I could possible repair the videos be re-rending to a different format, however, we're talking about some 20 odd videos with the animations alone, so I'd like to avoid that if it's at all possible, because of time restraints and the hassle involved and such.

Now before anyone gets their shorts in a bunch here, please know that the vast majority of these videos are MY work...I own the copyright...and the few exceptions here (except for a couple of "home videos") are genuinely student work (like a little documentary I did on the styles/designs of the 1950's for a typography class back in college), which does clearly fall under "fair use"....I am NOT trying to infringe on anyone's work here or anything like that...as an artist and musician, I do very much respect that issue.

Anyways, I really need to get these videos back online and working correctly, as the hosting site I'm using for the new portfolio only allows limited storage and bandwidth...which I'd rather use for my still work (photography, vectors, stills of 3D models, etc)...it would be FAR more convenient and efficient for me to simply link to the new channel from the new portfolio website.

Soooo....any clue what might be causing this...is there something better to use than "Save from"....or better yet, any clue how to fix it?

Thanks!

 

[Crown]

Moved to the recording / editing / production / software / hardware forum.

 

[Farley Productions]

Hmmm...your problem sounds very similar to something I had trouble with back in 2011/2012 with a couple of laptops. But not similar enough for me to distinguish what might be causing "upload processing" errors." However the Quicktime players are no longer supported by Apple but you could download codecs for them instead up into the latest version in case it's not completely updated.

Now on to getting your 20+ Animation videos from channel to another. You mentioned you've used "save from dot net." I can't say how well that site is for downloading Youtube videos. I tend to download movie trailers myself for reviews or discussions. But I've been using "Clip converter /./cc" (remove the / sign and spaces) and "y2mate (.com)" Both sites have been very credible and allow you to download entire videos (excluding music straight from videos).

For online storage I use "Google Drive." Most Youtube accounts you create come with this since you're creating a Google account. You go to the Google website and click the "dot" icon in the top right and the drop down menu will feature Google drive. Once you activate it (for free I might add) you can use up to 1TB of storage data. I've uploaded Wedding Videos and Voice Overs for clients and they had no problem downloading the videos from there. Plus you could also upload PDF files and DOC and Picture files there too. So it's very useful.

So to recap I'd try one of the sites I've mentioned to redownload you videos, upload them to Google Drive and then back to your New Youtube Channel. Not 100% if the Quicktime Codec will help the player issue but it's worth a shot. Media Player Classic has always been super reliable for me and I use it on a daily basis. But I hope some of this helps you. If you're having any trouble feel free to message me here, Facebook or Twitter and I'd be more then happy to redownload your videos and send them your way. =]

Try to have a good day bud.

 

[Lomitus]

Hhmmm...I just tried using clip conv on one of the YT files and got an error, "Conversion failed - ************* is not available for videos containing music.". The interesting thing is that the file I just tried to download should NOT have had an audio file attached to it...it SHOULD be a video only demo reel and I don't remember rendering it with audio (and certainly no audio plays when ran from Youtube or the system here at home)...although that's not to say that the original render didn't include some form of audio track by default (it has been a couple of years, so I don't remember the exact render settings). That ALMOST might lead me to believe the problem might be with audio tracks, BUT...some of the files that are actually working...some have audio, some don't (again a couple are from when I was with a Classic/Southern Rock band as lead guitarist).

Curiouser and curiouser....

I will consider the online Google storage, however to be honest....1TB really isn't A LOT for me any more. I currently have around 5 TB of harddrive space on my system at the moment (nearly maxed out)...not including my wife's system (she's an applications developer) or my secondary rendering system (used mainly for lower detail backgrounds and such) or my laptop, etc.,...and I'll be looking to add another 2 to 4 TB as soon as I can afford it (the family is having some money issues at the moment). The problem there is mainly these animations I do...some of my animations end up using 100 - 150 gigs or more PER project, for animations that are typically 6 minutes in length or less....kind of insane really. I'm still quite amazed by some of the stuff I can do (I use Autodesk Maya among other things), but yea...it takes it's toll with storage and makes "backups" rather frightening at times. Seriously...even with a 20 mps internet connection, trying to backup 1 TB....uhhhhhhg.

It's kind of funny as I do have all the original files from the renders I created, just not the final renders themselves (they had been saved separately on one of the 2 drives that crashed...the new house has some power issues we're still dealing with), so IF push comes to shove, I CAN go back and re-render, but again due to the number of videos I have (over 40 animations of da Vinci stuff alone)....that's gonna be a throbbing headache right now at best.

...and no, I don't yet know if the hosting site I'm looking to use will allow off-site linking like that anyways (some do, some don't). Along with the move, crashes and other issues, I was looking to switch hosting sites anyways because my old portfolio was on Altervista....which was/is just painfully slow for graphics and such.

On the Quicktime thing...that's part of what's kicking me in the shorts here is that again SOME of them will play (in QT)...and some won't...but ALL of them will play in MPC. And it's the vids that won't play in QT that are crapping out during processing on YT. Under other circumstances, I'd be tempted to think it was a simple codec issue or something along those lines (I've had that happen before), but they were all...the later animations at least...created using the SAME codecs and again, ALL were downloaded from YT. In my early days of 3D animation I used to use the Sorenson 3 codec, however in more recent years...including most of these specific animation, I've switch to MP4 (H264). If ALL of them were crapping out, I could understand that, but only SOME of them are...again roughly about half of them.

Anyways, I'll keep farting with it and if I come up with anything, I'll post here in case others run into similar problems....and if anyone has other suggestions, please feel free to chime in here!

 

[Lomitus]

Just a quick addendum here...I just tried the y2mate thing as well (which I think I tried yesterday)...same results. Video downloads, but will NOT play in QT...however it DOES play just fine in MPC.

Hhhmmmmm.........

BTW...not sure if this helps, but "won't play in QT" isn't exactly accurate...it WILL play...the time slider does move when I hit play, however the video is again just a blank white display (and no sound...which is fine because there shouldn't be an audio track on this particular file anyways).

 

[Lomitus]

Ok...I just had a weird thought cross my mind here - the word "converter". It's been a while since I messed with this sort of this, BUT...I seem to remember that years ago, files that got uploaded to YT were converted to flv's....didn't really matter what format they were created with, they got converted (during processing I think). Do we know if YT still does things this way...and if so, how to access the flv files (or whatever format they may be using now), instead of running them thru a "converter"? My thought here is that perhaps it's the conversion process that may be causing the problem...although WHY it would affect SOME of the files and not others is still a mystery. I'm pretty sure that "streaming video" still puts it on the user's harddrive SOMEWHERE...yes? This is just a guess, however I suspect the other download sites I've been trying to use may do this same thing...covert the files from whatever format YT uses to MP4's....

Thoughts?