Creative Communities of the World Forums

The peer to peer support community for media production professionals.

Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy Export Settings for Raw Footage, Uncompressed

  • Export Settings for Raw Footage, Uncompressed

    Posted by David Mayer on May 2, 2011 at 9:23 pm

    Which export setting will result in uncompressed files that are identical (roughly) in size and quality to my original captured media?

    I am delivering one hour of raw, uncompressed, unedited media to the client. The single media file that I captured, using the DV NTSC 48kHz Anamorphic capture setting, resulted in
    a 12 GB file, as it always does. I want to break this up into 3 files that are each about 4 GB so I can burn them to separate DVDs and mail to the client.

    Exporting as Pro Res makes the files bigger than they originally were and Quicktime 1280 x 720 results in a file way too small.

    Thanks,
    Dave

    iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB
    OS 10.6.2
    Final Cut Pro 7.0

    David Johnson replied 15 years ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • David Johnson

    May 2, 2011 at 11:03 pm

    Dave,

    I understand what you mean, but before answering, have to first clarify that you do not want “uncompressed” since there would be no gain in quality by transcoding DV footage up to Uncompressed so the only thing that would accomplish is a much, much larger file.

    The export setting that results in files that are identical in size and quality to the original captured media is always the export setting that is identical to the capture setting (unless the media has been altered in FCP) … in this case, DV NTSC 48kHz Anamorphic. You just need to trim each of several instances of the footage to one-third (or one-fourth) the total length before exporting. It might be easiest to count on 4 DVDs since it’s hard to divide a video file into three exactly equal parts and you don’t get a full 4Gb of write space on a DVD so one or two of the files may end up 4.2Gb and not fit on a DVD.

    Another way is to duplicate the captured file from the Capture Scratch folder three times, trim each down in QuickTime Pro and export them from QTP without even going into FCP. That can be more difficult to explain if you’re not accustomed to using QTP for that kind of thing so the first method seemed safest.

  • Rafael Amador

    May 3, 2011 at 9:05 am

    Hi David,
    I’m not that clever. I don’t understand nothing of what you intending to do.
    You are talking about 12GBs DV footage. That means 1 hour.
    Which is your original media? codec, size?
    What are you trying to do? Converting DV NTSC to 1280×720 Uncompressed?

    [david mayer]
    Exporting as Pro Res makes the files bigger than they originally were and Quicktime 1280 x 720 results in a file way too small.”

    What means that?

    http://www.nagavideo.com

  • David Mayer

    May 5, 2011 at 11:22 am

    David,
    Thanks – using the same setting as the capture setting makes sense and
    seems to be working.
    Also, i never bothered to educate myself about the definition of “uncompressed” – of course what you said makes sense – the pro res files always come out huge.
    David

    iMac 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB
    OS 10.6.2
    Final Cut Pro 7.0

  • David Johnson

    May 5, 2011 at 4:58 pm

    Glad to help, David. FYI, ProRes isn’t “uncompressed” either … it’s compressed with the proprietary Apple ProRes codec … “uncompressed” means there is no compression done to the media … it is just encoded to a particular “uncompressed” codec such as the AJA or BlackMagic Uncompressed codecs, which come in both 8-bit and 10-bit varieties. There is no advantage to using an uncompressed codec for media that did not originate as uncompressed (such as DV compressed footage).

We use anonymous cookies to give you the best experience we can.
Our Privacy policy | GDPR Policy