Exporting quick and small

[Tom Wolsky]

The smaller you want to make the file the longer it will take to compress, the more processing and bit crunching needs to be done. The higher the resolution the original to the smaller the file the more time it takes. One hour into a small file is going to be a long time. Compressor tells me its H.264 at 854×480 800Kbps is about 310MB/hour.

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”

[Michael Sacci]

If you have FCP you have compress software in Compressor. You should be able to get very good H264 down to 1 or 2 GB. Time to encode can be better than real if you buy some hardware. For $130 you can get TurboHD and for $500 you can get a H264 card from Matrox. Matrox should give you better quality at the same bitrate for the extra money. Either one pays for itself pretty quickly.

[Chris Tompkins]

What is the end file you’re looking to create?

Export your timeline “current settings” making a reference file.
Drop that file into a compression software like episode, squeeze, compressor, – and then create your end file, Flash, mpeg, QT, wmv, ect.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta

[Maureen Barillaro]

Thanks for the comments- Here’s what I ended up doing- Rendered *most* of it- (first render test took quite awhile for rendering and kept doing the “write video’ message over and over so I stopped it after a few hours then just rendered red and some green bits. I had also gotten the “out of memory” cue after the first attempt at rendering. I found some info here about how to deal with all of that) For exporting I chose Custom settings. Set it at 320X240, 50% quality and H.264 video compression with key framing every 24 frames. A one-hour cut with BITC took about 2.5 hours and ended up being 751MB- this was what I was hoping for!