FCP QT to AVI for PC

[David42]

“uncompressed AVI with thousands of colors” raises flags for me. Not millions?

What FCP compression settings are you using? As a basic concept in going cross-platform, use transcoding that is 1:1. No information lost, no counter productive enlargement of the file. AVI’s do tend to be bigger, but going uncompressed is not necessarily going to buy anything on the windows side.

Are you exporting from a timeline, a reference QT, or a stand-alone QT? DV on the QT side? DV compression on the AVI side? Add the proper .avi extension? Did you try importing the .avi, instead of drag and drop?

Read all the export options carefully. Try doing the export from QuickTime Pro, rather than from FCP.

Barring that, try the conversion on the windows machine, from a stand-alone quicktime.mov

[Kevin Jones]

I am exporting uncompressed AVIs with the intent to convert to Flash on my PC with software I already own. I’ve done this in the past going from one PC to another but now I am running into a wall. I will try adding an avi extension on my next test and let you know how it works.
Thanks!
Kevin jones
2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5
4GB DDR533 NON ECC 4X1GB
2X500GB Serial ATA-7200rpm
16x SD DL(DVD-R/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GF 6600 256 SDRAM
Final Cut Studio

[David42]

” I will try adding an avi extension on my next test and let you know how it works.”
—
If that’s all it is, just rename the last effort by adding the .avi, on the OS/finder level. Mac export dialogs are spotty about adding (or not) the extension, but you get used to it.

Going uncompressed to get to a highly compressed flash movie sounds like a lot of wasted data expansion. Is the flash end product why thousands of colors makes sense? I don’t do Flash myself.

My QuickTime export dialog offers AVI, but I forget if that is a Flip4Mac plug-in, which I do have. Under the AVI Compression options, I see DVPro50, which is a good 4:2:2 codec, upsampling from dv, without the size of uncompressed. In the color-space option, I get Millions, or 256, no thousands offered here.

On the Quality slider, I’d turn it all the way up.

Best

[Kevin Jones]

Adding the extension was a no go.
My life should be so easy!
I’m using Turbine Video Encoder and it really likes AVIs.
Makes nice Flash movie. Looks good on the web and my client likes the way they play universally.
Something in the process of exporting from FCP to AVI must be the problem.
If I can figure out a way to make my PC recognize the AVIs created by FCP I’ll be happy!
It’s got me beat so far.
Thanks!

Kevin Jones
2.5GHz Quad-core PowerPC G5
4GB DDR533 NON ECC 4X1GB
2X500GB Serial ATA-7200rpm
16x SD DL(DVD-R/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GF 6600 256 SDRAM
Final Cut Studio

[Kevin Jones]

Well I finally got it to work.
I exported the timeline as AVIs with a DV compression instead of uncompressed.
I don’t know what I was thinking since my source video was DVCAM.
Much smaller files and still great quality.
Apparently there is some AVI file size limitation that my PC will recognize.
Nothing over 1 GB.
Everything is now encoded to Flash and tomorrow I deliver to my client.
I am Happy!
Thanks for the input!

Kevin Jones