[Drew Umland]

Hey,
The term for what you want is called Time-lapse. The process can be similar to stop motion, but the intent is different.

Sure, you can let the camera run and then speed it up in post. However, After Effects would probably be a better solution than FCP for that if you need to speed it up more than 1000%…and FCP kinda sucks at speed adjustments anyways.

As far as the streaks of light you desire from the traffic that comes from the “shutter speed” of the camera. I’m not familiar with your specific camera but sonys usually have the option to open/slow down the “shutter”. I put it in quotes as video cameras don’t really have shutters. Its a simulated effect. Of course, to change that you will probably can’t use auto exposure mode.

Cheers!

[Drew Umland]

I think he might be talking about burning it to a data DVD for archiving or distributing purposes. At least I hope that is what he is trying to do.

[Drew Umland]

Hey Steven,

Short answer:
If good quality HD films could be stored on DVDs they wouldn’t have needed to come up with blu-rays. Even that requires a dog choking amount of compression.

Long answer:
You can’t fit a watermelon through a hole the size of a lemon without squeezing some juice out of it. So you are going to loose quite a bit of quality trying to get that 90 gig file down to 4.5 gigs. What you mean by loosing it’s “HD Quality” I’m not quite sure. As “HD” only really refers to the display dimensions of the image…and loosely at that since it can (usually) mean 1920×1080 or 1280×720.

Compressing it as an h264 MOV using FCP, Quicktime Pro, Compressor, Adobe Media Encoder or whate have you will give you a good looking file that is much smaller. However, if it probably won’t fit down to the size you need unless make the quality settings at around medium or lower. Which might not give you the result that you want.

If you really need to transport the file at a reasonable quality your best bet is going to be a pocket USB hard drive. Or squeeze it down to about 14 gigs and dump it onto a cheap SD card. :/

Keep in mind that your master file is probably an Apple ProRes and that it won’t be playable on most computers. So you do need to convert it to a different codec. And don’t overlook the audio settings. An hour long uncompressed stereo audio track can eat up a lot of space. AAC would probably be your best bet.

This will get you a good looking file that is much smaller. Still not small enough to fit on a DVD I’m afraid.

VIDEO
Compression: H264
Quality: Medium to High (Don’t bother with best it will make a file of similar size to your master)
Key frame rate: Automatic
Frame Reordering: Yes
Dimensions: 1920×1080 or 1280×720 (If displaying on a TV I find that 720 scaled up to 1080 looks better than 1080 with aggressive compression)

SOUND
Format: AAC
Sample Rate: 44.1
Channels: Stereo
Bit Rate: 128 kbps

Prepare for internet steaming (NO)

Hope this helps, buddy.

– Drew