Exporting In Web-Friednly Format

[David Roth weiss]

In order to help you we need to know the running time of your video, and it would help to know its original video format.

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.

[Nicole Haddock]

The best way to get web anything out of FCP, in my opinion, is to export a self contained file of your timeline, and then use Compressor to make the web file. Final Cut is really for cutting video. Compressor is for… compressing video! 😉 They have a lot of presets for the web which are fairly easy to adjust and get to a reasonable size (but which might not have reasonable quality, depending on the desired file size).

When in FCP, open your timeline, and choose file/export/quicktime. Do not choose quicktime conversion. Let FCP export the file, which will probably be huge. And then you take it into Compressor, which I do not have the time to give a step by step tutorial on how to use.

This isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but some of the ideas are still applicable:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/harrington_richard/final_cut_compressing/video-tutorial.php

HTH.

[Kathy Obrien]

My video is approximately 40 minutes long. Most of the video was shot on mini DV, but one of the cameras was AVCHD. I converted that file to mp4 before bringing it into FCP. Does that help?

[Jim Glickert]

Hi Kathy. Here are the steps I take to put my home videos on my own website.

(1) From the FCP timeline, I export the finished sequence as a self-contained QuickTime movie.

(2) I open Compressor, and compress the QuickTime movie using the “Apple Device–H.264 for iPod video and iPhone (640 x 480; 1.5 Mbps)” setting. (You may want a different setting.) Using this setting, a 17-minute long, high definition (1280 x 720; 30p) QuickTime movie, for example, that was originally 8.6 GB in size was reduced to just 194 MB.

(3) THIS IS A STEP YOU CAN SKIP. I take the resulting file and, using Flix Standard, tweak it a little more (by sometimes adjusting frame rate, audio rate, output size, etc.) to get exactly what I want. The result is a Flash (.flv) file.

(4) Using Dreamweaver CS4, I create a webpage to play the video, then upload that page and video to my web host’s servers. If you are instead planning to upload to YouTube or other public video websites, you may have to do things differently.

If you would like to see a sample of my finished product, go to https://www.gojim.tv/Videos.html and choose a video.

It wasn’t perfectly clear to me whether your wedding video was a video of a wedding that you recorded, or a video of your own actual wedding. If the latter, congratulations!

Hope this helps.

Jim

[David Roth weiss]

[Kathy OBrien] “My video is approximately 40 minutes long. Most of the video was shot on mini DV”

Yes that helps…

As you’ve discovered, creating a 40-min Web video at a pleasing resolution isn’t as easy as a doing the same for a 4-min. video.

Follow Jim’s advice for #1 and #2 and report back if you need additional help.

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.

[Alan Okey]

[Nicole Haddock] “The best way to get web anything out of FCP, in my opinion, is to export a self contained file of your timeline, “

If your timeline is fully rendered, it’s often not necessary to export a self-contained Quicktime movie. Instead, you can simply export a Quicktime reference movie by unchecking the “make file self-contained” dialog box when exporting a Quicktime movie. You can then open the reference movie in Compressor and use it as the source file for your encoding. For long projects this is often a faster way to work, as the Quicktime reference movie merely refers to existing media rather than requiring it to all be copied into a new file.

[Kathy Obrien]

OK, I got it to work through Compressor! Thanks everyone!!!