How to Bulk Export

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Jeremiah,
The best way is to export from FC a Master QT movie with the higher quality you can achieve.
Import the master to Compressor.
In Compressor you have all the tools to automatize the process and build and save droplets.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Gary Askham]

Do you mean projects or sequences?

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FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Jeremiah Crowley]

Thanks for the replies. This is for sequences…

My original thought was to “batch export” from FCP and skip compressor. Thoughts?

Thanks to all once again

JC

[Alan Okey]

[Jeremiah Crowley] “My original thought was to “batch export” from FCP and skip compressor. Thoughts?”

By skipping Compressor, you’re giving up two things:

– the ability to get the best quality encoding by tweaking various options in the Frame Controls tab

– the ability to make full use of all available cores in your computer via virtual clustering through Qmaster

If getting the best quality or having the fastest encoding isn’t important to you, then of course you can simply batch export sequences from within FCP.

[Jeremiah Crowley]

Thank you for your response. I would love the best quality at the fastest rate. Can you lay out the procedure?

Thanks

JC

[Rafael Amador]

Adding to Alan wise considerations,
[Jeremiah Crowley] “My original thought was to “batch export” from FCP and skip compressor.”
The FC’s “Batch export” is better to be avoided.
Is QT Conversion.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Alan Okey]

[Dave LaRonde] “If all these edit timelines use the same codec, it would be easy — and fairly fast — to export reference (i.e. not self-contained) files, then drag ’em into Compressor and batch export a bunch of H.264’s.”

This is exactly the workflow I would recommend. Use FCP’s batch export feature to export reference (i.e. not self-contained) Quicktime movies of all of your sequences, then bring those reference movies into Compressor to create h.264 Quicktime movies.

As for specifics about Compressor:

1. Set up a virtual cluster on your computer. Search this forum for “Qmaster” or “vrtual cluster” for step-by-step instructions. Note that the “sweet spot’ for the number of instances to assign Compressor in the Qmaster preferences will vary depending on the number of cores in your computer. On an 8-core machine, the sweet spot seems to be 6 cores.

2. Create a custom encoding profile in Compressor by starting with an h.264 preset, then switch on Frame Controls in the Inspector tab and select Best for the resize filter. Make sure to set the frame size and pixel aspect to your required specs, then save the custom preset.

3. Open the Quicktime reference movies that you batch exported form FCP and apply the custom encoding preset that you created in step 2.

4. Instead of submitting the job to “local computer,” choose the virtual cluster that you created in Qadministrator in step 1. This will ensure that Compressor will make full use of the optimum number of cores for processing.

Note that the “send to Compressor” feature in FCP unfortunately cannot utilize virtual clusters:

https://support.apple.com/kb/TS3079

This makes it necessary to manually batch export from FCP and then process the exported reference movies in Compressor in order to make the most efficient use of multicore processing on the computer.

Ideally, the “send to Compressor” feature should be updated in a future version to support job submission to clusters. I think that the feature is pretty weak in its current implementation.

[Andy Mees]

[Rafael Amador] “The FC’s “Batch export” is better to be avoided. Is QT Conversion.”

Actually Rafa that’s not quite correct. Jus for clarities sake, Batch Export gives all the options and potential advantages of both the regular Quicktime Movie export method as well as the less well liked Quicktime Conversion export method. In the Batch Settings window, if you choose “Format: QuickTime Movie” then you are doing a regular QuickTime Movie export … if you choose any other option, including “Format : QuickTime (Custom)” then you are doing a Quicktime Conversion.

Cheers
Andy

[Andy Mees]

[Dave LaRonde] ” if you set QT Conversion to the codec of the edit timeline, it can’t do any harm”

Although Batch Export will not necessarily force a QuickTime Conversion as noted previously, I think its worth noting that if you actually do intentionally target a QuickTime Conversion using the codec of the timeline it will force a full and probably unnecessary re-compression of that timeline … so its a full generational quality loss albeit only a digital one, obviously something thats always better to avoid if possible. That said, am pretty sure Dave’s point was more about recommending exporting reference movies which are obviously not actually QuickTime conversions at all (and as long as the source codec is an I-frame one then that also has the benefit of speedier export times and zero quality loss).

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Andy,
You are right.
I was pointing to the “QT Custom” option that is the one that would let downscale the time-line and make an H264 for the web.
That’s is pure QT Conversion, so no control (bit-depth processing, downscaling, interlacing,..).
Another big problem may be when batch exporting un-rendered sequences to Multi-pass H264.
You may need to process your sequence THREE times on exporting.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com