compressing a 7 minute movie

[Mark Maness]

Export to H.264 – Apple uses this for all of their movies.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Jeff Carpenter]

Check to see if your client has Quicktime 7 on their machine.

If so, use the “Export -> Quicktime Movie” right in the Final Cut menu and give this a try:

=========
Video:
H.264
480×360
Quality = Medium

Audio: AAC
Mono (unless stereo is really needed)
Bit rate 128 kbps
Sample rate 44.1
=========

That’s just a starting-off place. You’ll probably have to re-adjust settings once you see how that works out for you. If it’s way too big, take the size back down to 320×240. But I’d try it with the slightly larger size first.

The final size depnends on the motion in the video, but you should be able to do pretty well. Here’s an example of a 40 second video (at that frame size) that comes in at 2.5 MB.

http://www.penguintail.com/parrot

[Laura H]

thanks Jeff, it worked beautifully!

[Jeff Carpenter]

Glad it worked.

I didn’t say earlier, but just so you know…the animation codec is the exact opposite of what you wanted. It’s very good at preserving quality…it keeps each frame intact. It’s not concerned with saving space at all, that’s not what it’s made to do. That’s why you were having such bad luck!

H.264 is very good at saving space…it’s actually a version of MPEG-4. It only plays in Quicktime 7 or iTunes, however. If you’re dealing with Quicktime 6 then go with H.263. It doesn’t look as great, but it’s more compatible with more systems.

[Rennie Klymyk]

I thought power point wouldn’t handle H.264 files. Don’t you have to go with flip 4 mac = wmv for power point?

“everything is broken”

[Jeff Carpenter]

I had assumed (always a bad idea, I know) that Powerpoint could just tap into Quicktime and play anything it could. This is the Mac version she’s talking about, after all, not the Windows version.

But you raise a goopd point, Rennie! Can you test this, Laura?

I could test this for you tonight if you need, and report back. (I only have Powerpoint on my home computer, not here.) Let me know.

[Laura H]

Just tried it and it looks great —- fortunately it will be shown on a mac and not distributed to our PC-based company.

[Laura H]

I’m looking for compression settings that will make this file as tiny as possible. So I’m exporting from FCP, I’d like to keep the video @ 400×380, (thanks to Jeff Carpenter for the dimensions). Does anyone know of decent compression settings in .avi format? it turns out they’ll be showing this in PowerPoint on a pc. thanks for your help

[Rennie Klymyk]

[Laura H] “I’d like to keep the video @ 400×380,”

Opps, don’t you mean 480×360? 400×380 is basically square.

It’s been a long time since I did anything for powerpoint but it seems to me most everything on that side is windows media.

Check out this earlier thread-

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?univpostid=902734&forumid=8&postid=902907&pview=t

“everything is broken”