exporting from FCP the web

[Michael Sacci]

Most video on the web is either FLV (Flash) or H.264. This is a question for your web designer.

[Bret Williams]

Someone here pointed out that flash has supported h264 content for awhile now, and therefore you can output an h264 .mov and simply change it from .mov to .flv and voilà it works! Now you can have both with one render. AND, the quality of h264 in the flv. For those who don\’t know flash video, you also need to place the flv within a .swf shell. I do it by dragging it into dreamweaver which creates the swf portion and the HTML code. I\’m sure there are other ways.

[Jim Glickert]

Hi Roger. I can’t authoritatively say which format is best, but I know what works for me.

Most of my projects are 1080i, edited on FCP using ProRes. I export the finished timeline to a QuickTime self-contained movie, then take the resulting .mov file and compress it (using Compressor) to an H.264 file. Finally, I use Flix Standard to convert the H.264 file to Flash. (Yes, I know that simply changing the .m4v extension to .flv will work, but I like the ability in Flix to make minor adjustments, if any, to some of the video/audio parameters.) Then, I upload the .flv to my website. (If you’re planning to upload to YouTube or other sites, you’ll want to check out their requirements first.)

One thing worth mentioning is that my Flash files are much smaller in size than the H.264 files from which they’re converted (without much difference in quality, in my humble opinion). For example, a recent video of mine that started out as a 30GB QuickTime was compressed to a 300MB H.264 file, and then to a 135MB Flash. For viewers with slower Internet connections, the ultimate file size can be pretty important.

Hope this helps.

Jim

[John Carrithers]

Hi Roger,

It depends on where your video is going. If if you’re uploading it to a video hosting site like youtube or vimeo they’ll convert it to flash video for you and provide you with a way to embed or link to the video. Whatever you’re end use of the video, flash is the way to go in my opinion. It’s a great looking format and most people have flash installed on their computers regardless of platform. If you’re not comfortable encoding an FLV file and creating flash players, export an h.264 and upload it to a video hosting site like vimeo, exposure room or youtube. Then you can embed or link to the video. Sites like exposure room and vimeo will even let you password protect the video if you using it for client approval on projects.

Hope this helps,
John