AE CS5 only see black when playing a rendered mov file in QT

Question

AE CS5 Mac 10.6:  After rendering a movie as Render:Best Settings / Output:Lossless I get an mov file (quite large, 193MB) - awesome thats what needs to happen.  Now upon viewing that mov file within QT, I get the timer (8 seconds) and the playhead scrolls those 8 seconds, yet I see nothing - only darkness and utter black.  Now on the flip:  when I render this same file as Best Settings / H.264 and play the mp4 wha lah you get a smooth playing video.  Downside, this file needs to be uncompressed and at the highest quality and playable in QT (a mov).  Is the file too large for my machine to handle playing?  Is this another QT vs AE bug?  Anyone please, input is as alway greatly appreciated.  Oh, 1 more piece of the puzzle: Pixel Aspect Ratio: D1/DV NTSC Widesceen (1.21).  This is a file to be played on an LED arena ribbon...
Thanks

Answer 1

>  Is there a codec missing from my AE?
That wouldn't cause the file to play fine in some places and not elsewhere.
This is a gigantic file in terms of horizontal pixel dimensions, and the data rate is quite large, too (nearly 200MB for only 8 seconds). I suspect some combination of QuickTime Player and the computer on which you're trying to play it (e.g., slow hard disks).
Does it really matter whether this can play in QuickTime Player? We've seen that it plays in post-production software. Has the client tried playing it in the way that it will actually be played/used---i.e., on the LED screen at the arena?
And, again, are you and they really sure that this huge losslessly compressed format is what is required? As I said before, this is very much not the kind of format that is intended for playback and distribution. Uncompressed files and files compressed with Animation are intended for purposes like use as intermediate files in post-production, not playback.