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FCP Error – “File Too Big”
I’ve been trying to export a feature-length film from FCP for the past two days. It’s about 110 minutes long and I’m exporting as an HD 1080p h.264 quicktime file directly to an external terabyte drive (because we’re ultimately going to get it professionally encoded and burned to a DVD).
However, the first time I received an error message saying “file is too big”. Understandable. But I have tried exporting it in increasingly smaller increments, and I am now down to 15-minute segments, and still no luck, every time I get the “file too big” error message. In the temporary items cache folder on my startup disc I see that the unfinished file is about 6.6 gigs.
My question is in three parts – 1, how large of a file is FCP capable of exporting? 2, is there any way I can increase that amount so FCP can export a huge file, as I need? And 3, is there any way to get FCP to cache the encoding movie file on my external drive instead of my iMac’s startup disc?
Thanks.
P.S. – I’m using an older version of FCP, version 6.0.6.
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2 Replies
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[Elana Mugdan] “HD 1080p h.264 quicktime file directly to an external terabyte drive (because we’re ultimately going to get it professionally encoded and burned to a DVD).”
If you are going to pay someone to professionally encode the movie they are not going to want it encoded to H264 before hand. You need to be giving them a master quality codec such as ProRes. THere is no reason you should not be able to export the movie in one piece.
What are your sequence settings?
What you need to be doing is File>Export> Use Current Setting and make sure “Make self contained” is checked.
There should be no cache with an export, at least if you are exporting it the right way.
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As Michael say, you can not export an H264 to be reprocessed.
H264 is for delivery, and probably you set “Key-frames: All”, or “Data-rate: Automatic”, so you are getting an Uncompress file packed as H264: Huge file.
Export a Prores movie is all that you need to do.
rafael
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