[Dennis Leppell]

A workaround on this is to set in and out points on your timeline, the set in and out points on your clip. drag clip to the canvas window and drop it on the ‘fit to fill’ option. FCP will stretch or squeeze the clip speed, and not affect the other clips on your timeline.

[Dennis Leppell]

Just to verify, you were originally exporting from FCP using export ====>Quicktime Conversion? If so, that’s why the frame size is being changed. You want to export=====>quicktime movie, and use current settings. This will keep your aspect ratio at 4:3 with rectangular pixels. From there you can use Compressor or Quicktime to change to 640×480 with square pixels

[Dennis Leppell]

Here’s the quick and dirty explanation…There are many different ways to encode a file. It really comes down to the type of codec used. Quicktime, for example, will play back .mov files, but that .mov file may be a standard quicktime movie, a final cut pro self-contained reference file, an h.264 file, etc. Each type of codec generally has a specific purpose, but they all essentially do the same thing….deliver your video/audio in a format that your video player can understand.

Animation codec is basically a type of quicktime file that includes information about transparent pieces of the video, or “alpha” channel. In the same way that you can export a .tif image from photoshop with a transparent background to include into a video, you use the animation codec to export a .mov to use in Final Cut for animated graphics, like lower 3rds. When you export a video from whatever program you used to animate the handwriting, you want to export as a Quicktime movie, and then change the video compression type to animation. Select color depth to say millions of colors +. The “+” indicates the alpha channel information is included. If you don’t do that, all the alpha information will be exported as black.

[Dennis Leppell]

Three ways to do this….results may vary.

1) Use compositing. Cut the clip into two seperate clips, with the cut point being where you want the black to fade out. On the second clip, where you want your background to be in place, Select a compositing method that works best for the look you want. Cross dissolve between the two clips.

2) Do the animation with an alpha channel, so that instead of black, you have no background. Export with animation codec, millions of colors+, and bring this into FCP. Place onto timeline, with a black matte or slug underneath. Fade out slug at appropriate time.

3) Similar to option 1. Cut the clip into two, on the second clip, select the “color key” filter and key out the black. Crossfade at the appropriate time.

[Dennis Leppell]

Check the top most drop down menu under “Frame Controls” in the inspector window.

[Dennis Leppell]

Once you drag the preset to the clip, double click the preset’s name (in that same window). Now you should be able to make all the changes you need. Go to the geometry window in the inspector and change your dimensions. You’ll be asked to save the changes as a new preset…do this if you want to….it’s a good idea to do that if you have multiple clips you’ll be exporting using the same settings.

[Dennis Leppell]

[Christy Pessagno] “I understand that it is probably compromising for the square vs rectangular pixels, but how does this automatic change affect other things, like when we bring the file into dvd studio pro, or want to stream it out to a tv?”

This automatic change is because QT Export wants to make it a video to be viewed on your computer. That’s why you need to manually change the settings of the dimensions.

If you send your 640×480 picture to DVD SP you’re going to need to again customize the picture size, adding another level of rendering to the piece, and resulting the final piece not being as good as it could be.

To correct the problem, you should export only as a self-contained reference file
Export >> Quicktime Movie >> Current Settings.
Be sure that self-contained is checked. This will give you your 720×480, the resultant file will be as good as you can get possibly get out of FCP, and the export itself is very quick.

[Dennis Leppell]

FCP shouldn’t be putting files/folders where you don’t want them. Double check your setting and verify that ONLY your external drive has check marks in all boxes across the board. If there’s drives other than your external listed, make sure there’s no checkmarks in any of the boxes. Save and get back to work.

[Dennis Leppell]

disposable, yes….but not from Walgreens. We use XL2 and (now) a Z1U. all shoulder mounted on a rocking fishing boat, makes for not the easiest source footage for compression.

Following a few guides, including Ken Stone’s, I decided that I had to be as hands on as possible to counteract the recompression that youtube will do (they took away the flash hack, grrrr). Progressive, because it’s viewed on the web. color correction because there’s no simple saturation boost setting (that i know of); youtube seems to desaturate colors a bit after uploading. Boosting the sharpness to counteract it looking soft what they’re done with it. Contrast and gamma to keep from looking washed out. Frame controls were specifically to help with deinterlacing and motion of a constantly moving camera.

The whole process leaves a video that doesn’t look all that good when played back on the computer, but is fairly decent once recompressed by youtube.

Yea, our footage is about the worst you can use for compressing for the web; this was my attempt to make it look passable on youtube, and compared to stock settings from youtube, it looks drastically better.

[Dennis Leppell]

I spent 2 days in compressor hell trying to figure out the best setting template for our situation (hunting/fishing tv show, so lots of busy backgrounds and camera moves). here’s what I came up with:

export FCP self contained movie.

drop this movie into compressor

video settings:

h.264
30 fps
keyframe ever 15
data rate restrict to 10,000 kb/s optimized for download
faster encode (got a new 8 core since I set this up, and am doing my first vid w/ it and compressor 3, so I may got multi-pass now)

audio settings:
AAC
Mono
44.1 kHz
best quality
128 kbps

Now for the various settings you can set inside the inspector window. These were tuned after lots of research and 40-some test vids to combat various things like soft picture, muted colors, with some compromises for encoding time.

Width: 640
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: Square
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: 30
Frame Controls On:
Retiming: (Good) Frame Blending
Resize Filter: Linear Filter
Deinterlace Filter: Better (Motion Adaptive)
Adaptive Details: Off
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Progressive
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: Off, frame reorder: On
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 75
Min. Spatial quality: 25
Key frame interval: 15
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 25
Average data rate: 10.24 (Mbps)
Brightness And Contrast
Brightness: 0.000
Contrast: 5.000
Sharpen Edge
Amount: 18.600
Color Correct Highlights
Red: 12.000
Green: 12.000
Blue: 12.000
Color Correct Midtones
Red: 12.000
Green: 12.000
Blue: 12.000
Color Correct Shadows
Red: 12.000
Green: 12.000
Blue: 12.000
Gamma Correction
Gamma: 1.100

You can set all this yourself, or here’s the easy way: download the setting here: https://rapidshare.com/files/156828008/Youtube.setting.html

See the results here (keep in mind the shakey camera/busy background causes a lot of the artifacts you’ll see):

youtube.com/watch?v=HW_pmQcrQGc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW_pmQcrQGc

I just encoded a 6 minute vid to upload, and it took 14 minutes on an 2 X 2.8 GHZ quad core w/ 2GB ram, MUCH faster than the 2 hours it took on my G5. File size is 461 GB, well under Youtube’s 1 GB limit.

If anyone has any improvements on this setting PLEASE let me know.

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