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How to render MPEG2 out of FCP?
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To be fair, Bouke is absolutely brilliant, very helpful, and completely correct that everything you’re asking about is well-covered in the manuals.
Personally, I believe one of the hardest parts about learning something new is finding out the right terminology. I’m not surprised that “rendering MPEG-2” didn’t turn up much in an FCP forum.
Now that you know to export a self-contained movie and bring that to Compressor, you’ll be off to a solid start and able to come back with specific questions if you run across anything. Good luck!
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
MPEG-2 is just a little flavor of something call Digital video.
That’s what you need to learn.
Is all about to understand how two Analog signals (A/V) are sampled, packaged and compressed.
That shouldn’t be difficult to understand with your background.
Understand the nature of Video and Audio may require more efforts for you.Lucky you, now there are documents available like this:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=final+cut+7+profesional+formats&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
And you have the COW here, willing to answer the questions that you will find in your way.
rafael -
Perhaps I worded my question poorly. I understand how to export self-contained movies out of FCP, and I know what mpeg-2 is. What I was really wondering was why I can so easily export an mpeg-2 video out of a program like Vegas, but it is not possible to do this with Final Cut (without the extra step of going to Compressor). What I was wondering was if I was missing something because I could not find a way to export an mpeg-2 format video directly from FCP.
In any case, I get it – Compressor is the answer.
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[John Ranta] “Perhaps I worded my question poorly. I understand how to export self-contained movies out of FCP, and I know what mpeg-2 is. What I was really wondering was why I can so easily export an mpeg-2 video out of a program like Vegas,”
10 years ago, MPEG-2 wasn’t on the scope of any Video Editing system.
In the end is all about if you like to use an “All in one” tool or separated tools, to do the same task.
IMO, there is not a single tool that will give you the same result that when you select the best tools for each task.
FC used to have available a “QT MPEG-2 Export Component”, that allowed export MPEG-2 through QT Conversion. Very little recommendable if you care about quality.
Rafael -
[John Ranta] “Bouke, you may yet have one or two things to learn, yourself…”
Oy…
Yes, you’re right, I’ve got lots of things to learn.
But i do exactly that, not by asking others to read the manuals for me.
(and yes, it takes time and effort, hoping that this is correct English.)Bouke
https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pros -
Bouke, one thing you may want to learn is not to judge people you don’t know too quickly.
I have read the documentation on exporting videos from Final Cut Pro. My students and I have exported a hundred or more videos over the past year, in various formats, from FCP. That was not my question.
I was hoping to find a way to export a video from FCP in an mpeg-2 format. In the FCP docs I did not find any mention of exporting mpeg-2 format. I thought to myself “mpeg-2 is such a common format, there should be a way to do this in FCP. Maybe I’ve missed something. I’ll search Creative Cow”. But after doing a search of the Creative Cow forums, I did not find any answers to this question. So I thought, “I’ll post a question to see if there’s a short cut or trick to doing this that I’ve missed.”
I found two things – one is that I can only do this through Compressor – and two is that asking a question on Creative Cow can result in unwanted and unhelpful criticism.
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If you absolutely HAD to do this in one step you could simply create you’re own specific MPEG-2 preset in Compressor and then simply use the “Share” feature in FCP and select that preset. This is a one-step process for all future Exports of MPEG-2.
Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.
http://www.ambidextrous.net -
Again, the fact that my cable channel video server only supports mpeg-2 means that yes, I absolutely have to do this.
And, the fact that my sysadmin installed Compressor in such a way that one has to have admin privileges to configure and run it on our iMacs means that I will either have to provide admin privileges to all of my high school students (which I can’t do) or that I will have to login as admin and run Compressor myself every time a student is exporting a video for broadcast on the cable channel.
This is such an easy thing to do out of Vegas (and I suspect other digital editing programs). Why is there such resistance to exporting an mpeg-2 video in the FCP world? I freely admit to not being a video geek with 20 years in the business, but it seems rather arbitrary and unuseful that I can’t export an mpeg-2 video out of FCP. Is this some sort of religious restriction?
Again, thanks to all who have replied (well, most of you, anyways). I’ve learned a bit about FCP and mpeg-2, in any case. JR
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[John Ranta] “And, the fact that my sysadmin installed Compressor in such a way that one has to have admin privileges to configure and run it on our iMacs means that I will either have to provide admin privileges to all of my high school students (which I can’t do) or that I will have to login as admin and run Compressor myself every time a student is exporting a video for broadcast on the cable channel. “
Just use compressor to create a droplet and then give the droplet to your students to use to compress their files. The droplet will contain all the settings and all they have to do is drag there exported video onto the droplet and compressor works in the background to encode. And a droplet should not require any administrator rights to use.
**Hindsight is always 1080p**
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[John Ranta] “Is this some sort of religious restriction? “
The only restrictions are on your improperly set system and on your environment.
FC may be too professional for educational purposes.
You should keep on Vegas, and tell your student to jump to FC when ready for a professional workflow, on a system properly set.
What and how you want to teach your students is up to you, but if you want to teach them as professionals, stop discussing about “religious restrictions” in FC, fix your system, and teach them to work with whatever tool they need.
rafael
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