Advice on export

[Steven Gonzales]

Could you give more information about how the movie will be used? It’s tough to give specifics without knowing your intended use. How will the CD be used?

[L Dee johnson]

Corporate business sales video to be used by their sales force that do not have DVD on the laptops.
Again the piece is 10 minutes long. I want to give them the best quality and in a format that most laptops can utilize. Thanks in advance for any help.
LDJ

[Jeff Carpenter]

Do you have the ability to make sure that all of these laptops have Quick Time 7 on them? (Not Pro, just regular QT7.)

If you can make sure of that, start playing around with the H.264 setting. That will be best, but only if you can control those laptops. If they have QT 6 or 7 and you can’t control that then go with the H.263 setting. If you’re talking Windows Media Player only we’ll have to look at other options.

In any case, though, I’d be looking at making something that’s 480 x 360 in frame size and maintain the same frame rate as the original footage. Try a test and see what file size you get. Then adjust your settings (both audio and video) from there if it needs to be smaller.

[L Dee johnson]

HI,
Thank you for your info. Where do you find the H264 setting? Can you give me a run through on the work flow here?
Thanks again.

[L Dee johnson]

Hi Again,
I’m sorry, I see the setting in the Quicktime conversion. Is there anyway to see the estimated size of the file before going through the compression process, to optimize settings, instead of the try this wait 30 minutes, try that?
Again thank you for your info and patience.

[Steven Gonzales]

You might want to consider a program that will save to Windows Media format, such as Flip4Mac, because a lot of laptops and pc’s in general don’t have quicktime installed.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Unfortunately, a lot of this is trial and error. The final file size depends a LOT on what is in your video…how much motion there is, and how complicated the images are.

That being said, expect to be in the 100-250 MB range, I would think. I know that’s a pretty wide guess, but that’s my point. It’s hard to judge, even for the computer. Give one a try and see what you get. I’d put the “quality” slider in the video settings at about the 70% mark and set the audio to AAC, 44.1, VBR, and near the 128 range. Raise that a little higher if the audio is important, like it’s got music or something.

Start there and see what it looks like. You may be able to lower the quality but that depends on if you like what you see.

[L Dee johnson]

Hi Jeff,
Thank you for all your great advice. I found a good setting going with Sorenson 3 compression, but I found that the music tracks were there, but not the VO tracks? Any ideas on why this is? I left the audio uncompressed, since it is quite important for the project. Great music, but no voice?
Thanks again,
LDJ

[Rich Rubasch]

For pretty much universal PC playback MPEG-1 is the way to go. Nearly every computer still alive will play it and it will scale pretty good. If you have Compressor 2.0 it will make MPEG-1 clips. Cleaner is ok too. I shoot for around 3000kbps and make the movies 480 x 360. In cleaner you can crop the sides a bit which will help the overall image. If you use cleaner also slightly add some brightness and perhaps some saturation.

Windows Media is ok, but you’ll need Flip4Mac (not a bad purchase) to export Windows Media 9 clips directly from the timeline. For those I use 640 x 480 and go max quality 2 pass VBR.

Still MPEG-1 will allow everyone to view the files, they will play on slower PCs and will scale to full screen pretty well. Windows Media might give you a better looking file but does require you to be able to export to WMV out of FCP ($179 for the Flip4Mac Pro package).

Stay away from Quicktime…too many PC users will not have it and you will get nothing but complaints that the movies you provided will not play on their computers.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Rich Rubasch]

Ok, there is no longer MPEG-1 on export out of FCP. I did try an MP4 and it turned out pretty good. What is the compatibility of MP4 on a PC? Is it pretty universal with Windows Media Player 9? Because I could make a nice looking 640 x 480 clip that looked fantastic.

But with cleaner I still would go with MPEG-1.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media