I just purchased Toast 6 Titanium and have a question.

How do I export a project into Toast and burn it to a CD so that it can be viewed on not only a MAC, but a PC as well using Quick Time, Windows Media Player, Real, etc.? I want to make sure that my video can play in these players and I would appreciate it if someone could tell me how to do it properly and quickly, with minimal confusion. I am new to Toast and the manual is not much help.

I do understand how to export the file out of FCP, I am just not sure if (a) I am doing it correctly and (b) it's not playing on the PC with the other players I mentioned.

Thank you in advance for anyone who can give advice on how to do this. I am also going to post this in the FCP nonlinear forum as well.

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Moderator note: we don't allow cross-posting here at DVinfo since it generally leads to confusion and redundancy down the road as people reply to the duplicate threads. I've removed your post from the FCP forum, but if you'd prefer to have the thread appear there then I can move this copy. Thanks. -Boyd

When you export from Final Cut use QT and use settings like Sorenson 3 under options. This will create a QT file that you can use on both Macs and PCs using QT.

If you want a file that will play in Real, choose MPEG-4 in the options and just use one of the preset settings. A compliant MPEG-4 file will play in QT AND the most recent Real.

To get a file that will play in Windows Media Player you would have to export as an AVI, and that would play in both QT (not the greatest) and WMP.

In toast, you drag the resulting file to the Data tab with the Mac & PC button selected. If you do not see the preferences tray there is a little icon below the roxio logo that looks like a triangle with a box drawn around it.

Your other option is to simply export your movie as a Final Cut Pro video file, and burn a Video CD or DVD.

Another option in addition to the ones Mark mentioned is to export from FCP, open the file in the QT pro player, export using Toast Video CD. This creates a .mpg (MPEG-1) file that will play from a CD on Mac or PC.