[Titus Nachbauer]

Thanks for the tip. I forwarded it to our editor. She’ll be happy to hear there is a way without using all that conversion.

Kind Regards,

Titus

Nachbrenner Productions
Amsterdam/Zaandam
http://www.nachbrenner.com

[Titus Nachbauer]

You’re probably right on the MPEGStreamclip issue, I was never able to encode FLV with that program, but then I don’t have Flash either. I did however find that one can use ffmpegx (Google it) to encode to FLV in pretty high quality for free. It’s a frontend for the open source ffmpeg command line tool. If that scares you, just give it a try, you will see it’s easy enough to use. If you like it and want to use it for commercial purposes you should register of course, to support development. However compared to Adobe and Sorenson ffmpegx is still cheap.

The On2 encoder is probably a bit better if you tweak it, because the keyframe detection and other nifty features are pretty advanced, so if you need really small files I would go for that. Also ffmpeg has the nasty habbit of giving you no clue to what’s wrong if an encode fails. You will always have to check the logfile for that, but hey that’s a frontend for you. But it’s still free.

My procedure is as follows:

1. Export the video from Final Cut in normal editing resolution. Use File > Export > Quicktime Movie for this.
2. Use compressor to encode, resize and deinterlace the video to h.264 with lots of bandwidth (see the podcast below).
3. Use ffmpeg to encode the video to FLV at the same resolution and at the desired bandwidth. Check the “high quality” and “multiple pass options” and set the keyframes to one in every 5 seconds for better results. Ideally you should not have to encode the audio again.

This will often take some experimentation, but you can get really professional results.

The second step is crucial, because ffmpeg will not give very good results on deinterlacing and it won’t accept many input formats in the default install. Of course in an ideal world you wouldn’t compress anything twice, but then most people do that anyway when uploading to Youtube.

See these great COW podcasts which helped me a lot to clarify things (they do contratict each other a little bit, I wonder if you will notice 😉
https://podcasts.creativecow.net/final-cut-studio-podcast/final-cut-pro-compressor-deinterlacing‘>
https://podcasts.creativecow.net/final-cut-studio-podcast/final-cut-pro-compressor-deinterlacing

https://podcasts.creativecow.net/final-cut-studio-podcast/compressing-for-ipod-and-itunes

thanks to the makers of these casts!

Kind Regards,

Titus

Nachbrenner Productions
http://www.nachbrenner.com

[Titus Nachbauer]

Same problem here, only the files were created on an intel mac with the final cut version on the studio 5.1 DVD. Since updating to 5.1.4 it seems that it cannot readf any project file that was created before.