Exporting for 720×480 NTSC Timeline

[Bob Tanner]

I tried in After Effects and Final Cut, but the quality is unclear…

[Tom Wolsky]

You can’t record your whole screen if it’s in the wrong aspect ratio to be edited. If you can scale your media down to 1280×720 them do it. Or down to 720×480 anamorphic and as Chris said work in DV50, but be aware of the limitations of SD media. Why are you going to SD? Is thus going to DVD? That’s going to be a problem for computer screen capture. There is too much detail for a heavily compressed format like this. To do this properly you need a scan converter that can capture the screen directly to a video format.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Bob Tanner]

Its a video montage that I’m making, and most of the video in the timeline is home NTSC video and a photo slideshow. The final output is a DVD for a standard TV and for a projector. I just tried using Screenflow with a custom export of 1280×720 , but as soon as I drag it into my 720×480 timeline, the video lost most of it’s quality…

[Tom Wolsky]

It’s not going to look good if you go down to DV. It’s not going to look good on DVD. If you want something for DVD I’d suggest you reduce the resolution of your monitor and do a screen capture at DV widescreen size. That’s the only hope. Basically the detail on this screen that I’m typing on, and which is probably very similar to yours, is far, far beyond the capabilities of compressed video formats like DV. Just not going to happen. It can’t compress these words from this screen and still keep them legible.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Bob Tanner]

I tired that, doesn’t really make a difference… There isn’t any way to have two different timelines within one in FCP?

[Tom Wolsky]

No. A sequence has to be in a specific format. You cannot output a file with multiple codecs and formats in it.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Bob Tanner]

I guess the best way to go, is to have a 1440×960 timeline, where my screen capture looks great and then I exported my 720×480 timeline into a regular .Mov video and then imported that into my new 1440×690 timeline. I prefer to do it like this, because before you could barely watch the screen capture video…

[Bob Tanner]

I guess the best way to go, is to have a 1440×960 timeline, where my screen capture looks great and then I exported my 720×480 timeline into a regular .Mov video and then imported that into my new 1440×690 timeline

EDIT: So I went with this approach. Made a new timeline, 900×600. This way the screen captured video great and the rest of the video looks a little stretched out, but I don’t think anyone going to notice, since its not too bad…

I just wanted to thank everyone who spent time to try and help me figure this out!

All the best,
Zevie