Final Cut Pro 7 – Exporting Issues

[Shane Ross]

You are using FCP to do something it isn’t designed to do. You are trying to edit screen captures in the H.264 codec with varying frame rates. FCP doesn’t do this. FCP is designed to edit broadcast formats…broadcast resolutions and broadcast frame rates. And it doesn’t like working with H.264 at all. It might SEEM like it does at first, but then export…or edit a lot of it…bammmo! Issues.

You should be using a different app to edit this. Screenflow. Adobe Premiere would even be better.

Now, that being said…if you can export a good looking MOV file, just open that in MPEG STREAMCLIP, and save it as an MP4. All that does is change the container…resolution should remain the same. I do this lots.

Shane
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[Matthew Marchesi]

[Shane Ross] “if you can export a good looking MOV file, just open that in MPEG STREAMCLIP, and save it as an MP4. All that does is change the container…resolution should remain the same.”

Thanks for the response Shane. Will this process cut shrink the file size at all? Is there a way to do afterwards? I will really need to shrink the file size down for these videos.

I’ll give that a go in the mean time.

Thanks much for your response. I really appreciate your time.

~Matt

[Shane Ross]

[Matthew Marchesi] “Will this process cut shrink the file size at all?”

No…just change the container. Wait, you want to COMPRESS it too? Make it a smaller file size, and MP4? Well, yeah, that will effect quality. You can’t have crystal clear video at the same resolution as the full res version, AND have a small file size. You just have to find the largest file size you are OK in dealing with. Quality will suffer…sorry.

Use Compressor…or MPEG STREAMCLIP to convert the footage. Or Media Encoder…Sorenson…

Shane
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Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Matthew Marchesi]

Compressor! Doh! Why didn’t I think of that? God I feel stoopid right now.

Mpeg Streamclip worked perfectly though, it even cut about 175 MB off of the MP4 file. I can deal with a 15 minute video at 102 MB. The clarity suffered only a tiny bit. Much better than before when it was so blurry I couldn’t make anything out.

Thanks a million Shane! Problem solved!

~Matt

[Ian Dallimore]

Hi matt,

im having similar problems, im getting fuzzy export with mp4’s on h264 codec. did you manage to find a solution to your problem?

heres my recent post..

Hi all,

I’m trying to export an mp4 file from fcp (as this format is most compatible with our clients). However, i’m getting a really bad fuzziness and bad blending in tone.

I’ve created an animation in cinema 4d (a mov file with h264 compression) and ive edited it in fcp adding video transitions and still jpgs. I’ve matched the sequence settings with the main animation clip, Although i have tried exporting mp4’s and mov files using a number of compressor codecs in the sequence settings and i think i have narrowed it down to being an issue with the h264 compression in the sequence settings as any mov file i export using a different sequence codec seems to be fine.

It gets especially bad where there are transparencies in my animation clip where i have faded objects in.

problem seems to be when i have both h264 as the codec in sequence settings combined with exporting mp4’s. export settings are set to current and both the source clip and the sequence and export settings are 1920×1080. Data rate is 5120 kbps. audio/video settings are set to DV NTSC

HELP!
thanks, Ian

[Matthew Marchesi]

Hi Ian,

Basically, I exported to .mov and then used MPEG Streamclip to convert. Worked fine for me. I also had the option of using Compressor, which I hadn’t thought of at the time. You might want to give Compressor a shot.

Hope this helps, I’m definitely not one of the smartest folks around here, and if it doesn’t, you may need to hit one of the geniuses up. 🙂 Good luck.

~Matt

[Ian Dallimore]

Thanks matt, great idea.

I hadn’t thought to use it either. I haven’t used it yet as i have only been using fcp for a couple of months. Hopefully this will sort the issue!

Ian