Exporting from FCPHD question

[Ron Jones]

If I am exporting to Quick Time Movie from FCPHD that is, 720x480, frame rate of 30, ket frame every 300 frames. What should I set my data rat to get best quality? I set it at 900 and got some blurring on parts of QT movie.
This will be burned on CD and used on PC to be projected.

[Boyd Ostroff]

How long is your movie and what file size do you want? Compressing enough to fit on a CD and projecting on a large screen may not give very good results...

[Ron Jones]

Boyd,
The movie is 3 minutes long.

RJ

[Boyd Ostroff]

Seems like 3 minutes would fit on a CD without having to recompress anything and would give you full quality. Why not just try Export > Quicktime Movie with the current settings, I think it will be around 600MB.

Depending on the PC software I'm not sure whether or not this will work for playback under Windows... not much experience there.

[Ron Jones]

Originally Posted by Boyd Ostroff

Seems like 3 minutes would fit on a CD without having to recompress anything and would give you full quality. Why not just try Export > Quicktime Movie with the current settings, I think it will be around 600MB.

Depending on the PC software I'm not sure whether or not this will work for playback under Windows... not much experience there.

Thanks Boyd, for your info

Ron

[Martin Mayer]

.....but don't try and play the resultant entire 650MB file from the CD - most CD drives will have a problem with that.

Copy the file from the CD to the PC's hard drive first and play it from there.

Quicktime Player (for Windows) should be able to play it back.

[Bradley L Marlow]

Hi Boyd,

As you may recall, I have the same set up as you so thought I would ask the pro a question. :)

I just finished a 58 minute edit project on FCP HD. My goal is to export this out of FCP in the highest quality possible that will fit on a DVD. I will be using IDVD on my mac to burn it.

I have only done short films so I would always export quicktime movie with zero compression. This resulted in a 10GB plus file and obviously that won't work.

Could you guide me as to the proper, highest quality settings, format, etc?

Thank you in advance!
Brad

[Boyd Ostroff]

Well sorry, I've never used iDVD... However, I think you're mixing apples and oranges a bit here. The 10GB file would be DV compressed, like the native format of your project. iDVD works with MPEG2 files which are compressed much more. If you copied your DV file to a DVD, it wouldn't play in a DVD player - is that what you want? In other words, you can use a DVD as a storage medium for any kind of files, but if you want them to be viewable in DVD players they need to be MPEG2, and that's what iDVD does.

I've heard that the compressor in iDVD isn't top notch, but as I said, I have no personal experience one way or the other. All I can tell you is that using my standalone DVD recorder I can burn 60 minutes of material on a disk at the highest quality setting. It looks great with that setting, hard to tell it from the original DV.

My suggestion is to just let iDVD do it's thing and set it to the highest quality, which I'm guessing will allow for 1 hour on a disk. Then see if you're happy with it.

Maybe someone with specific iDVD experience can offer some further insight.

[Bradley L Marlow]

Thank you Boyd,

As you may have guessed, alot of this process is pretty new to me (DVD work).

So if I simply take my 10GB file and drop it into IDVD, the program will "do it's thing"... and compress it to a playable format at the highest quality possible.

IDVD does the compression and there is no reason for me to apply a compression in FCP while exporting. (dim light bulb sputters)

Just call me "Freak Eye Red", kick me in the @*^ and send me to la la land. I've been playing with the rubber bands too long.

Thank you again Boyd...I REALLY appreciate all your help and taking the time.

Sincerely,
Brad