My problem is quite simple: I have a MOV file tha I can watch with Quicktime. But I'm unable to import it into After Effects (a message appears saying that the format may be unsupported). The video format is ProRes 422 (HQ), 3840 x 2160.
By the way, I'm using a Windows 7.
Anyone?
Mov is a container for audio and video (and sometimes other media/meta) to live in together. Mov is not a video or audio encoding. It is just like a folder, only you can't click into it and doesn't have a folder icon. Each unit of data has it's own encoding. In this case your video is encoded using ProRes 422.
This is a quote taken from wikipedia:
ProRes is a line of intermediate codecs, which means they are intended for use during video editing, and not for practical end-user viewing. The benefit of an intermediate codec is that it retains higher quality than end-user codecs while still requiring much less expensive disk systems compared to uncompressed video.
This means that ProRes is a codec created for video editing. It is also made by Apple. If it loads in Final Cut Pro then we know the codec is setup on your system. If It loads in Final Cut Pro and not AE, we know that AEis not setup to use that codec. If the video does not load in FCP but other ProRes videos do load, then we know that there is a problem with how the video was encoded to begin with.
The ProRes codec, or piece of software that encodes/decodes ProRes is not currently setup to be used in AE. That is, AE must know how to use ProRes.
ProRes comes build in when you install Final Cut Pro. If you don't have access to FCP, you can still download and use the codec:
...But only if you are on a MAC. Quicktime comes with a ProRes Decoder build in. But it does not give access to the decoder in other programs. After effects also translates every media it imports into a frame buffer, meaning for AE to use ProRes it needs both an encoder and decoder. This is not possible in windows.