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Exporting / Saving / Copying in Quicktime vs in FCP
Hi,
If I’ve got a Quicktime movie in my FCP project, and the last 10 minutes (or 5 seconds, or 1 hour…) of the file is junk, can I open that file in Quicktime, make in and out points, choose “Trim to Selection” and then “Save as self contained movie,” without losing any quality? Or does it go through another compression in Quicktime?
Is there any difference between doing this, versus opening the clip in FCP, choosing In&Out points, then “Export as Quicktime Movie” and replace the original quicktime movie with the new shorter one? Has it undergone any additional compression or is it the same as just copying a file?
And, while I’m at it, is there any difference in quality between “Export as Quicktime Movie” versus using Media Manager and choosing “Copy”?
I guess the underlying question is, is there a difference in the way FCP, Quicktime, and OSX itself copy a movie file, and/or export, and/or “save as new movie”.
Just some things I’ve been wondering about for a while.
thanks
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3 Replies
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In my experience…QT7 is an amazingly powerful tool. If you open movie properties CMD+J … you can extract any of the tracks, see if there are any external referenced files, and edit metadata.
QT7 isn’t recompressing anything unless you “export”. Just doing a “save as” will retain same codec and just save the frames you’ve trimmed to selection.
It’s important to note that if you trim to selection and simply “save”, you’ll keep the same file size…but not be able to access any of that media you cropped. You have to do a “save as” to truncate the file size to only your desired frames.
-Jason
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Thanks, I’ll try that.
Do you lose quality when you Export from FCP without changing the compression?
thanks! -
I’d say no, but someone else might have more insight.
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