[Brian Mccartney]

Looks like you are working on a 1080p XVID file.
What kind of Sequence is it in? The only thing that might make this more annoying that necessary would be if the video were in a mis-matched sequence.

Keep in mind though, just because Premiere can import and play the file doesn’t mean that it’s going to be snappy about it. An XVID AVI probably isn’t going to give you the best performance in Premiere. So about a minute to render a 4 second clip? It’s not really over the top slow, but if Vegas can do better job rendering it that might be a better path for you.

Not that it’s going to make a huge difference, but you might want to consider moving your media off your boot drive and putting it on a dedicated media array. Performance for playback will be enhanced for sure.

[Brian Mccartney]

You are correct, Flash (in the video sense) is just a wrapper for the video file. Depending on the codec and delivery method of your client you may only need to create an H.264 MP4 file out of FCP or Compressor. From there you can change the extension of the file from .mp4 to .flv and be good to go. In other cases you would need to get another encoding app like Adobe Media Encoder to handle the other codecs Flash supports like On2 VP6 or Sorenson Spark.

Just depends on how the client is going to use the file.

[Brian Mccartney]

I can’t speak to the MP4s from your EX-1 but I do know just a tiny bit about the GoPro. I just took some files from one of those a week ago and had no problem converting them to ProRes in Compressor. With a new install of FCP7 you should have everything you need. When you upgraded did you also re-install your OS?

[Brian Mccartney]

About the only thing I find the speech to text in CS4 useful for is comic relief.

[Brian Mccartney]

Richard, just curious. How do you have Compressor set up on your machine? I have a quick cluster set up on my machine (8 core mac pro) and I see comparable encoding times for the same codec, frame rate, and frame size.

I do see people using MPEG Streamclip quite a bit for this kind of transcoding so I am wondering if I am missing something here.

thanks!

[Brian Mccartney]

I’ll chime in here as well for good measure. A DV AVI is generally assumed to be an AVI file that uses the DV25 codec. Since it is a standard codec whether you use MOV or AVI as a wrapper FCP can see it and use it. Older versions of FCP used to complain and give a warning when importing DV AVIs saying that the performance may be degraded. Newer versions no longer display this warning.

Now, if they are using DV AVI as a generic term you might need to dig deeper into the whole codec thing as the previous poster’s opinions are certainly valid.

I say all this with some certainty since we acquire anywhere from 20 to 70hrs of conference footage a week. We do work in FCP, Premiere, and Vegas. Sometimes we directly contract the crews and sometimes we will receive content from outside vendors. But when working in SD we always specify DV AVI or DV MOV as the delivery format since it plays well within our cross platform infrastructure. HD is a different story all together.

As a side note… The particular crew you are working with might be under the impression that DV MOV files are lousy since the default QT player config on a Windows machine is to show the file at lower quality. I assure you that if they were to check the box that says “Use high quality video setting when available” in the preferences they would see just as nice an DV MOV as a DV AVI.

As I have deal with a wide variety of crews and post-prod facilities I find it counter productive to do finger pointing as to who is the worst offender, Mac or Windows users. I’ve seen serious ignorance of formats on both sides. I just try to help all of those whom I work with get me the files and formats I need to get my job done and get paid.

So, if you get a DV AVI you should be good to go but, as already mentioned, it never hurts to get a test file first.

Best of luck!

[Brian Mccartney]

Actually, H.264 is a supported video codec for Flash since ver 9. We encode LOTS of H.264 for flash streaming.

I think it it probably the most versatile codec for the web. It has a good balance between bitrate and quality. Using it in a Flash player enables you to deliver content cross platform and cross browser.

[Brian Mccartney]

As long as you got it working I call it a success!

[Brian Mccartney]

Mary, it seems like your machine has plenty of horsepower to handle prores. The fact that QT player can play the clips kinda proves that. Since the viewer window has trouble also it does sound like a codec or FCP+codec problem.

I know it may seem basic, but do you have trouble with any other HD acquired material in FCP? Do you have a capture card like Kona or Black Magic that you usually use? It might be the difference (although I am not sure how) since I use a Kona LHe in my system so all my presets are designed to work with that system.

This problem may exceed my ability to trouble shoot at this point but when I get back to my edit suite later today I will see if I can dig a bit deeper for you.

[Brian Mccartney]

There is no “real” manual control of ISO, aperture, or shutter speed in movie mode. It is set up to be fully auto. There are some hacks to get around the limitations but they are not optimal.