Export settings for digital master

[David Roth weiss]

Are you editing DV or HDV?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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

[Kevin Carlson]

Editing SD–figured no sense in editing HD when we have no HD footage, or HD final products.

[David Roth weiss]

It’s just that you said your original was on mini DV, and I wanted to clarification, because HDV also is recorded to mini DV tape.

So, since you’re editing DV, you can improve your graphics and text using the following trick before output, but your original video is as good as it’s ever going to get and it won’t improve.

When your done editing, go to Sequence>>Settings and change the compressor from DV to DV50, then re-render, now export as you did before as a self contained QT using current settings.

What this accomplishes is the following:

1) It renders to DV50 in 4:2:2 color space instead of the DV 4:1:1 color space, which means that your graphics and text will remain pristine and not highly compressed by the horrible DV codec.

2) The export will output a DV50 file instead of a DV file, which will be twice the size, but which will have vastly better color depth and less compression on your text and graphics.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[Kevin Carlson]

Thank you so much for writing back, and you’re right that I should have clarified, and not assumed everyone knew that the Canon XL2 won’t shoot HD.

Your answer makes sense.

So, is there no advantage to using Compressor to export for this purpose?

[Ken Jones]

If you want to save even more time make a “Quicktime Reference Movie” instead of a self contained movie. This is especially useful if you are exporting long sequences. Drop the QT ref movie into Compressor and set up a batch for output to your different formats. Batch Monitor will render your movies. You can then go back and work on other projects in FCP while Batch Monitor works in the background.

[David Roth weiss]

[Kevin Carlson] “So, is there no advantage to using Compressor to export for this purpose?”

Not only is there no advantage, but you’d have the disadvantage of not being able to render graphics and text in 4:2:2 color space.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[David Roth weiss]

[Ken Jones] “If you want to save even more time make a “Quicktime Reference Movie” instead of a self contained movie.”

Ken,

Yes it’s a time saver initially, but reference files can also be a disaster waiting to happen. As I’m sure you know, one render or one change in the timeline make a reference file completely NG. It’s very common for users at all levels to archive a reference file by mistake, only to find out later on they have no archived version of their project.

So, I encourage FCP users to create self contained QTs all the time simply for safety sake. Hard drive space is cheap, cheap, cheap these days, so there’s no compelling reason to save space any longer as there once was.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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

[Ken Jones]

David – all points understood, but…

[David Roth Weiss] “one render or one change in the timeline make a reference file completely NG. “

Wouldn’t one change in the timeline also make a self contained movie no good?
You would have to re-export either a self contained or a reference movie.
Granted, once you delete the original media and renders a reference movie does you no good.

In my tests, a self contained movie takes about 10X longer to output than a reference movie. If you are working on a deadline with long sequences (such as a 60-90 minute church service) a reference movie is a lot quicker.

[Kevin Carlson]

Thanks for the posts, guys.
I think you two already understand each other, but I tend to lean more toward the idea of exporting self contained files. True, if you change the timeline it won’t be changed in the SC movie, but at least I will still have that master of what the sequence was like at that particular time. Plus, I won’t have to worry about saving the digital raw footage if we only archive the tapes.

[David Roth weiss]

[Kevin Carlson] “I think you two already understand each other, but I tend to lean more toward the idea of exporting self contained files.”

Yep, I agree with you on all accounts Kevin.

Ken and are really in agreement too, but he just likes to take a bit more risk.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

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