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Custom Render Settings
I am in need of a simple render “preset” or “profile” so that our reporters are able to export their video and have the settings already be chosen for them (to lessen the chance for error).
Is this possible?
I’m an IT guy and not really a final cut pro person. So I’m an FCP newbie.
Any tips you can give me to point me in the right direction would be much appreciated.
Thank you
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4 Replies
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Well they are shooting to tape and importing that in through some AJA interface. It will then be output to mpeg4 (m4v) with out specific settings for the web. The file that is spit out is uploaded through our web interface to it can be played through our flash video player.
Currently they use a TV tuner card to capture the video played out through a deck over svideo. What a mess.
It wasn’t my choice to use FCP in the newsroom but it was our previous Cheif Engineer’s wise idea. He also thought it would be smart to buy iMac’s and run Parallels on top of the mac’s so they could run the Avid iNews client in Windows. He had the impractical thought that they could use the machine to edit their video and work on stories at the *same time*!
Now we have like 3 FCP licenses and that’s what we were instructed to use.
I basically want to make it as easy as I can for the reporters to export to the appropriate format. They shouldn’t be “touching” the settings but you know how that goes!!!
A little more background: A reporter and a photog go out and shoot their video that they are taking to one camera (to tape). They bring it back and import it into whatever system we have available. At this time is is the ATI TV Tuner card system until we can get FCP straightened out.
Robert Rittenhouse
WHIZ Media Group (WHIZ-TV)
Zanesville, Ohio -
You can setup a standard setting in Compressor. It has numerous presets so it would be a matter of adjusting one of them to match your needs and saving that as a custom setting. A suitable name for the preset like “This one knuckle head” might help.
In FCP you then mark an In and Out point, export to Compressor, select the preset and then you are ready to submit. There is still room for operator error, so a laminated instruction sheet nailed to the wall might help as well.
Matrox make an accelerator card for H264 encoding which might be useful to cut down long file render times. H264 is otherwise slow but nice results.
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“If they’re shooting on a DV camera, they can capture video & audio through firewire. Beta SP? You need that AJA card, not to mention a tiny audio board and other associated hardware.”
I don’t actually deal with any of the engineering gear but only the machine itself. I believe they just have a silver AJA box sitting there.So you’re playing news stories on a flash video player? The encode to mp4 will take time. Ouch. But I guess the newsroom’s already used to the delay.
For our website we have to encode these videos to a format that it accepts. One of those formats is mp4. We still need to tweak it to help out with motion. Basically now they are having to capture from tape on a TV tuner card. Save that file and run it through a 3rd party converter to spit out the file they need. If we can get them using a preset in compressor I think we will be OK. We tried to get the server to do the mp4 compression after they upload it but its just not possible in this short time frame.
They are actually only doing this to short clips of video that are associated with a news or sports story that is posted to the website.
Gotcha. You’ll STILL need a lot of storage, probably something in a RAID 5 configuration. How much do you plan to have in each bay? If I were you, I wouldn’t look at anything less than 2TB. Really. If it’s common storage on, say, 4G Ethernet, 8TB would be good.The engineering department are trying to handle this buy purchasing some 6TB NAS devices to store their video on. With our station the reporters actually have to import and edit their own video and they are their own editor before everything goes up on the web. I think our station is ran very different than the optimal environment but its what we have.
Thanks for the replies.
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Your best setup is to create a template for the reporter’s editing format… If they capture DV 4/3- 3:2 -48k 16 bit audio then just just label the template so they always use it.
M4v Workflow…
They can export to m4v pretty fast It can be done straight from final cut .. no settings involved use Export for Apple TV… great quality and no messing with settings..I also use avid, lol Avid stations they do require an Avid Tech for maintenance.. they also have their pro and cons… Very expensive solutions for simple tasks…
Pros with Avid is that imported media is converted at import that’s a plus, it also spends time converting media that does not need conversion on import… Quicktime dv files…… file handling in avid omf and mxf is just a plain mess for most regular users…
The advantage is the realtime hardware they use for their solution.Exporting from a timeline in final cut in quicktime native dv format is a super fast process only a couple of minutes… in Avid it takes between 12 and 15 minutes to export a 28 minutes segment from a timeline…
Final cut is annoying by not providing any realtime preview for m4v, and mp4 formats… It makes editing a pain… No cheap pci or plugin to import and convert for realtime editing so far to my knowledge…Best,
Marc Enette
Audio / Video Editor – A/V Post Production – Engineering – Sound Engineering – System Development – Workflow Optimization – System Customization
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