Video playback and import stopped working

Hi there

I’ve been running into a recurring issue on Cubase 10.5 (it happened on Cubase 8 before, but I thought I’d solved it by upgrading). Now it’s back.

The problem: On some projects I’m no longer able to import any videos at all (no matter the format or codec - tried all of them). There is also no error message. Projects, where videos are already present and have been working before won’t display them. The thumbnail display is blank + the video player screen black.

Specs:

|Edition|Windows 10 Pro|
|Processor|Intel(R) Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz 4.00 GHz|
|Installed RAM|56,0 GB (47,9 GB usable)|
|Graphics Adapter|NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070

Download my ER Media ToolKit Pro bundle and run it as a demo (free for 21 days), convert any original video you have into ProRes, using the ProResER App that comes in the bundle. You’ll get a warning message if something is wrong with your original video that may prevent you from being able to import it into your DAW after converting.
That should make any video compatible for professional work.

Thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately, this problem occurs with any codec (including ProRes) and any video that has been working previously. As said above, even videos that have already been imported into Cubase have since ceased to work (thumbnails are not shown and video player shows a black screen).

This also seems to be project-specific. Some projects don’t have this problem, whereas other sessions that I try to continue working on don’t work. Also creating new projects to work around the problem didn’t seem to help.

I have the same problem. I tried the suggested solutions but no luck. Any other ideas or suggestions?

  • Pierre

Hi @Uphys and @Pierre_Rosseau , that sounds extremely odd, I have never seen such a behavior in all my years with Steinberg’s software, even though I mostly use Nuendo I don’t see any reason why it should be any different, as they both share the same basic code.

Amm, the only thing that comes into mind is that probably something is causing the video engine to crash when you open certain projects, and from that point forward anything you do is affected by the lack of a working video engine. Could be that some video(s) you have in specific projects are somehow coded in a way that once the video engine tries to show them it renders it into a hang state, but as I said, I have never seen such behavior so I’m just throwing everything that comes to mind.

I would try a couple of things.

  1. “Hide” the videos associated with one of those problematic projects and load the project with those video files missing, then try importing a new video as I suggested above.
  2. if the first option fails, try to uninstall the software and download the latest version from Steinberg again. Maybe even try to load it without your personal preferences just to make sure.

Note that if you navigate: Studio>More Options>System component information. then click the Program Plug-ins tab, you should see a component named Video Player, and it should be checked to be active.

If you’re using hardware video playback monitoring as I do, such as Blackmagic Intensity Pro or other video monitoring methods such as AJA or other Blackmagic cards. make sure you have their latest drivers for your system.

1 Like

I have this EXACT problem. Certain projects randomly decide that you’re not allowed to work with video anymore. I remove them from the pool and trash completely, I add new videos etc. NOTHING works. If I open a new project I can add videoa but who knows how long I’ll be allowed to use videos on any given project. It’s not a problem one should have when you have deadlines…

Hey, been a few years - switched machines in the meantime…
I think I’ve found the culprit, at least on my end: For some reason Cubase has / had trouble with variable framerates. I needed to re-export all videos with VFR or anything like 29.97fps to even numbers (constant framerate is important - you can find this setting in Premiere or most other video editing tools).

I need to stress again that the problem is video importing in the first place - it didn’t even get to the playback stage.