John Ranta
Forum Replies Created
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Leah, no, I never got a response. But I have abandoned Creative Cow, because of the arrogant, abusive replies I received to other queries I posted. There’s a subset of Creative Cow “gurus” who hold great disdain for folks like me who aren’t experts. It was annoying getting replies that, instead of answering my questions, spent all of their time telling me how unworthy I was of an answer. Creative Cow is just not worth it for me…
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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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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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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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Walter, thanks. I come from high tech, having worked in Unix, CAD/CAM and Publishing for 25 years, but I’m pretty new to video. I’ve been teaching high school for 9 years now, and added Video Production to my classes (which include Flash Animation, 3D Studio Animation, Advertising, Entrepreneurship, and Broadcasting) 4 years ago when the teacher who taught it retired. I’m self-taught, and being the only Tech/Media teacher in the school I need to know a little about a lot of things. It’s a lot of fun, actually, and my students do quite well in film contests and college acceptances.
I’ve taught myself the basics of editing with Vegas and Final Cut, but I’ve never worked in the film/video industry (pre or post convergence). I didn’t mean to abuse the forum, I first did a search here (and in Google) on exporting mpeg-2 from FCP, and found very little. I’ll do some more research, and figure it out. It sounds like it’s time to learn Compressor.
Bouke, you may yet have one or two things to learn, yourself…
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(post was cutoff) The NEXUS supports
• MPEG-1 System Stream or MPEG-2 Program Stream
* Elementary video stream
• Three video resolutions (pixels) are allowed.
352 x 240 (Horizontal x Vertical)
352 x 480
720 x 480
• Picture rate must be 29.97 pictures per second.
• A maximum bit rate of 10 Mb/s is allowed.
• National TV Standards Committee (NTSC) with 4:3 aspect ratio required.
• Audio, if present, must be encoded into the MPEG file using Audio layer II, encoded at a 32, 44.1, or 48KHz sampling frequency.
• MPEG filenames may contain up to 27 characters (no spaces) in addition to the required “.mpg” extension. -
Thanks to all for the quick answers. Further questions, and info:
What is MXF and XDcam? I’m not familiar with these acronyms. It may help to explain more of how the process works for me. I have Vegas and FCP systems, all on our internet. I also have the video server for the cable channel on the same internet. When we render videos out of Vegas as mpeg-2 videos (straight to a hard disk file – not to tape or DVD), I simply transfer these over the network to the Nexus server, and schedule them to run. I’d like to be able to do the same on FCP – export an mpeg-2 video our of an FCP editing session straight to a hard disk file, and then transfer that file over the net to the Nexus server.
As for the Nexus mpeg-2 requirements (I am the broadcaster 🙂 ) – they are:
• Acceptable stream types:
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Damn, another program to learn 🙂
No, I have not used Compressor. I did accidentally click on it once, on one of our iMacs, and for weeks afterwards we got CompressorD messages all the time. I think I’ve been avoiding it…
Are there good tutorials out there? I’m guessing that some 11 year old will teach me everything I need on youtube, in a video tutorial…JR
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I just want to say “thank you” for the 10 hours you spent figuring this out, and your detailed explanation! It worked like a champ. JR
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We tried copying all of the photos to a new video track within the same project, and then trying to change the duration of those selected photos. We got the same “bonk” error message. But again, only some of our students are seeing this behavior. Others can change the duration for a bunch of selected still photos just fine, whether they are part of a larger track, or on their own isolated track. They say consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, but I’d love to see some consistency here (or figure out what setting we have to fix on the offending machines).
is this a bug, or a feature 🙂 ?? Thanks for looking into this – JR