"General Error" and "Unsupported Frame Rate"

A friend has asked us to assemble a short presentation. For demo footage, she brought some Quicktime ".mov" files that we were not able to open. (She mentioned that the files weren't "DVD" but "V-???" Two of the files yielded "general error" and the other read "Unsupported frame rate (FCP HD does not support this frame rate or the way it is represented"

When we tried to "Import" rather than "Open" the files, the message read "File Error: 1 file recognized, 0 access denied, 1 unknown"

What does this mean, and am I able to change FCP's settings or convert the files in order to bring these into the program?

This is more out of curiousity than necessity... the files were downloaded from her organization's web site. They were very small and ultracompressed and rather unworthy for a DVD project. The specs are as follows:

#1)
Sorenson video , 256X192, Million, Qualcomm Purevoice, Mono, 8.000 khz
8 FPS
3.71MB
Data Rate 118.56 kbits/sec

#2)
Sorenson video, 256X192, Millions, QDesign Music 2, Mono, 22.050 khz
8 FPS
10.40MB
Data Rate 121.23 kbits/sec

#3)
Sorenson video 3, 320X240, Millions +, MPEG Layer3, Mono, 11.025 khz
12 FPS
11.31MB
Data Rate 170.90 kbits/sec


(#3 was the one that said "unsupported frame rate" rather than "general error," by the way.)

I don't know what a lot of this pertains to. I assume that all this might be particularly designed for the web? What does the "data rate" and the kHz value pertain to? "Millions"?

Thanks!

Sorenson video , 256X192, Million, Qualcomm Purevoice, Mono, 8.000 khz
8 FPS
3.71MB
Data Rate 118.56 kbits/sec

OK

Sorenson video is the type of compression that has been used to make the movie size small enough to fit on a website.

256X192 (for eg) is the physical dimensions that the movie has been reduced to for the web. 'Normal' sized footage is more like 720x576. (Thats the PAL size - I can never remember the NTSC measurement - but its similarish)

Millions is the number of colours used. It's not actually a very accurate number, more of an indication of the quality. It's a good quality, BTW.

Qualcomm purevoice is the compression type that has been used on the audio.

Mono 8.000 khz is the quality rate of the audio. (FCP much prefers aiffs at 48.000 khz)

8fps is the frames per second rate. 8 is very low. PAL is 25 fps and NTSC is closer to 24 fps. This would give you trouble in an FCP sequence because it would need to try to convert 8 fps into 24 or 25 fps.

3.71 MB is the file size.

The data rate is the speed that the file can be transferred.

All of these settings are designed to make the video work on a website, as you suspected. They are not of a type or quality that you should use to cut with.