[Christopher Dunning]

Thank you for the reply, Mark!

[Christopher Dunning]

Oh, whoops. I’m sorry. My bad.

I worked for years in FCP7 and still love it, but was pushed into FCPX by a client job and have adjusted.

Go FCP7!!

[Christopher Dunning]

Thank you again, Ivan. This is really helpful.

And of course it makes sense to do a short test file, but I hadn’t thought of that. The 15 GB DV/DVCPRO -> 7 GB H.264 Compressor conversion took a couple of hours.

But if we want to play around with the quality / bitrate settings and not have to wait 2-5 hours (or more?) just to see if it works, we should set in and out on the FCP timeline and output that to Compressor. Or make a small sample version of the full 15 GB file (only a couple of minutes perhaps) and test settings with that.

Thank you for this.

[Christopher Dunning]

Thank you for the suggestions, Ivan. And thank you for making the point about file size, Craig.

I’m not sure I was clear in my original post so I’ll clarify here, though I suspect Ivan’s recommendations stand.

I am coming into the tail end of a very old project done by other people. I am trying to figure out the best way to get this 1 hour film available for purchase download via a website.

What I have as options are:

1) Open original FCP 6 file and output/export to Compressor
2) Output a standard QT file from FCP 6 and then run it through Compressor
3) Use the existing 15 GB file and run it through Compressor

So, I will follow Ivan’s suggestions in terms of target video bit rate settings and see what I get, but which of the three approaches is likely to yield the best results? Or is that a trial and error kind of thing?

And do people here think H.264 with a .mp4 container is a good approach? (That is what was recommended by someone else.)

Thank you again,
Christopher