[Randy Esulto]

Excellent. Thanks for your help and advice – much appreciated!

[Randy Esulto]

Hi guys – Thanks for weighing in on my question. Let me better explain my application…

I’m a DJ that uses music videos in my DJ sets and am taking my collection of DVDs and converting all the individual music videos into mp4’s. While I was in the process of converting them, I wanted to normalize the audio so that every track plays back at the same level. So, having used Soundtrack from FCP many times to work on audio files (including normalize them) I have usually had each music video saved on my computer as a separate .dv file.

In this particular case, I’m ripping the DVDs as one large .dv file so, instead of, say, 30 individual clips I have one large one that I cut up in FCP (one subclip/sequence) per video. I, then, want to normalize the audio of all these clips (separately) before exporting them.

Since these aren’t going off to another editor, sound mixer, etc, what is the most efficient way for me to accomplish what I’m trying to do (or do I need to go into each sequence, and select Modify > Audio > Apply Normalization gain? If so, is there some way I can automate that process (like an applescript or some sort)?

Also (if you feel like answering this…) Would you mind if I ran my workflow by you? I’m trying to achieve the highest possible quality h.264 mp4 files (must have a data rate under 3000/3500 kbs). I’ll give you an overview of my workflow and if you think there’s a faster and cleaner way to do things that will achieve a better result, let me know.

1: Rip DVD using VisualHub to DV at the highest quality settings (I don’t know the specs, bitrate, etc because it doesn’t show me) However, when I drop it into my FCP timeline, it doesn’t need to be rendered (if that helps). It rips the entire DVD as one large DV file.

2: I put that into FCP, make subclips out of the in/outs of each music video. I normalize my audio, make any edits I need to make, and export reference clips.

3: Finally, I drop the reference clips into a compressor cluster (2 Powermac G5 Dual 2.5 and my Macbook Pro Dual 2.5) and have it spit out mp4s with the following specs:

Name: Serato Video HQ
Description: .h264 mp4 with settings optimized for use with Serato
File Extension: mp4
Estimated file size: 1.69 GB/hour of source
DVD type: HD DVD
Partial sync: 0.5 seconds
Frame sync rate: 2 seconds
Field dominance: Progressive
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 720
Height: 480
Pixel aspect ratio: NTSC CCIR 601/DV
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: 29.97
Frame Controls: Automatically selected: Off
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: On, frame reorder: On
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 50
Min. Spatial quality: 50
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 50
Average data rate: 2.5 (Mbps)
Maximum data rate: 3 (Mbps)
Audio Encoder
16-bit Integer (Big Endian), Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz

Is there a better and/or faster way to arrive at my final mp4 files? Would it actually save me time and generational loss if I rendered the mp4 files directly out of FCP as opposed to first making the reference clips and then compressing those?

Thanks guys

[Randy Esulto]

Perfect!! That is exactly what I want.

Thanks!

[Randy Esulto]

Everything is selected… Now I’m working on a new project and I still can’t export a reference movie. I even tried exporting to my local drive (to see if maybe the NAS was creating the issue) but there was no difference.

I’m trying, now, to export a ref movie of a sequence that’s about 2 and a half minutes…FCP is telling me it’ll take 7 minutes to render.

Something’s obviously wrong…

[Randy Esulto]

The one I’m using for this is a Macbook pro 2.5 dual with 4 Gigs of RAM

[Randy Esulto]

After trashing the prefs as described below and deleting/re-rendering, my exports are still taking quite a while. The project I’ve been working on contains four sequences that are about 1.5 hours each. I exported sequence 4 (took just shy of half an hour) and am working on sequence 3 now. It, too, looks like it’ll take about half an hour to complete.

Shouldn’t this take only a matter of a couple minutes??

[Randy Esulto]

Ok. I just trashed all of my prefs but FCP is still doing the same thing… It’s as if the program knows that there’s render files associated with the timeline (because it plays back without needing to render) but when I go to export it, it’s as if those render files don’t exist.

Most of the render files were created during auto-render. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the problem, but I think I’m going to trash all the render files and re-render the sequences and see if that does anything.

[Randy Esulto]

Ok. another sequence just errored-out saying that the file was “too big”…I can’t imagine what it was “too big” for considering: A – it was a reference movie and B: there’s over 460 GB available on the NAS it’s writing to.

So, whatever, after that errored-out, I quit FCP and trashed the com.apple.RegFinalCutPro.plist and the com.apple.RegFinalCutStudio.plist files, restarted FCP went to re-export the same sequence and…same thing… “About 2 hours remaining”.

I’m lost…

[Randy Esulto]

Ok. I just went into FCP and under “All” everything was checked but under “Selection” it wasn’t. So, I checked them all off and am re-rendering. In the timeline window, the section above my clips that indicates parts that are in need of rendering remained completely grey and command R only produced the expected “flash” of a progress window.

I am, again, attempting to export it as a reference movie and, again, I have what appears to be a 2 hour wait ahead of me.

Another interesting note is that the sequence that was being encoded when I wrote the last post produced some interesting results in dvdsp… when I imported it and simulated it, large portions of the video clips had rendered to pure white…while others were normal…

I’ve never seen anything like it before…

[Randy Esulto]

I should have included that I do have the export settings set to “Current Settings”