brief description of Quicktime/QuickTime Conversion in FCP

[David Roth weiss]

Export>>Quicktime Movie: The best way to export a file absolutely identical to what’s on your timeline, and without losing a generation. Very useful for mastering
to a QT file, which can then be brought into Compressor to create any other type of video file needed, and also much quicker than going directly from the FCP timeline to Compressor.

Quicktime Conversion: An inferior video file conversion utility, best thought of as a convenience, but to be avoided 99% of the time. Compressor and even Streamclip are far superior.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Shane Trowbridge]

Fantastic!! That clears things up.

Am I correct that QT Conversions changes the compression of your source media in the capture scratch?

I thought I read that somewhere.

Thanks for your time!

[David Roth weiss]

[Shane Trowbridge] “Am I correct that QT Conversions changes the compression of your source media in the capture scratch?”

If you’re asking if it actually changes an original file destructively and converts the original to another codec or media type, that would be no.

Unless you direct an app to overwrite a file, none of these file conversion or encoding apps makes a change to the original file, they all create a new version of the original.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Shane Trowbridge]

okay fantastic! Thanks for the help!

Shane

[Matthew Press]

Hi David. Do you check Make Movie Self Contained or not? Thanks

Thanks
Matt

[David Roth weiss]

[Matthew Press] “Do you check Make Movie Self Contained or not?”

I always export self contained files Matt and advise all of my trainees to do so as well. Reference movies become absolutely useless if even one underlying change is made to the sequence from which it was exported, or even if a single render file goes offline.

Because there is nothing in the file name that alerts users to a file’s status as a reference file, they are often archived as masters for future use, and they wind up being completely useless, leaving unsuspecting users high and dry.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Matthew Press]

Thanks for the info David.

Thanks
Matt

[Matt Lyon]

[David Roth Weiss] “Quicktime Conversion: An inferior video file conversion utility, best thought of as a convenience, but to be avoided 99% of the time. Compressor and even Streamclip are far superior.”

Hi David, can you elaborate more on this? I respect your opinion and I see that “quicktime conversion” gets knocked a lot on this board, by many different posters, as “inferior,” but I don’t generally share that belief.

From what I can tell, its scaling quality is equivalent to “better” in Compressor (provided you set your frame dimensions manually). It also has the advantage of being able to automatically insert keyframes at your edit points in h264 exports.

Granted, it can’t do things like good de-interlacing, or presets, or virtual clusters. But I use it all the time with very good results. It is also reliable and won’t mis-interpret your video’s field order. I can’t really recall a time where I ever thought Compressor blew away my “quicktime conversion” export. That being said, I mainly do high bit rate, progressive h264 exports for client reviews. It is entirely possible that there are situations that I don’t happen to come across, where Compressor would really smoke “quicktime conversion.”

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[David Roth weiss]

Matt,

QT Conversion can be effective for some things, especially simple exports or conversions where speed is more important than quality, but it’s certainly not got the control found in Compressor, nor it’s ability to preview output before starting to encode.

I think the ability to see that you’re exporting the proper aspect ratio is a huge advantage with Compressor, and it’s cropping features are also equally nice. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve wasted time by accidentally kicking out squeezed anamorphic video when using QT Conversion, and that ticks me off to no end.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Shane Trowbridge]

I’d like to add one extra thing into the conversation if it is okay. I have always been a Quicktime H264 guy. I am now needing to deliver MPEG4 videos with H264 compression and I’m finding that there is a slight quality issue. Almost a “zebra” effect with the video.

question one: am I doing something wrong with my MPEG4 export
question two: Quicktime conversion seems to be the only way I can export an MPEG4 with H264 compression. I tried to create a custom compression in Compressor with that option (MPEG4 with H264) and I can’t seem to create that.

Am I doing something wrong? Some help would be greatly appreciated!

Shane Trowbridge