RatVega
Enthusiast
Dec 29, 2005, 8:22 PM
Post #9 of 9
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Re: [toni] Upgrade from FCP 4.5 to FCP 5.0
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Hey, I don't know 90% of it either...
FCP is a very complex and wide spectrum application if your goal is to learn everything. Heck I don't even have the equipment to capture footage for some of the things it can do, much less any experience. I've focused on two things: understanding as much as I can about FCP as it applies to my milieu, and what capabilities it has in areas I don't work.
Exporting a clip for your friend is a no sweat deal, but first you need to decide where you want to be in the areas of size, quality, and playability. Platform is sometimes an issue as well.
If you want to send it to play on a decent computer at the best quality, I'd output it as QT .mov file. It will be huge (something like 225MB per minute) and will have to be loaded to their hard drive for playback because it requires more bandwidth than most CD/DVD players have. But it'll look pretty much the same as your timeline. If you max out all the quality settings, it's virtually the same as an FCP Movie but with a different wrapper. At 4 minutes, it's approaching 1GB, so you'd burn it as data on a DVD.
If you want to play it as a DVD, your only option is to encode as MPEG-2, either as primary streams for authoring in DVDSP or make the .mov above and submit it to iDVD, Toast, or whatever for automatic encoding. The quality is lower, but still quite good if you use the highest quality presets available.
If you're looking for something to play like web clip, your best encoding choices are MPEG-4, H.264, or one of the Sorenson codecs. These are fairly small, but still huge by "email standards." However, you have more control over the frame size and such to reduce the overall file size. Doing so is a bit of an art, so expect to experiment some to get the best quality/size combination.
Some PCs and older Macs may have a problem handling some of the snazzier new options like H.264, which rocks for size/quality but requires a lot of processing power to decode. PCs tend not to like oddball specs (like 32-KHz/12-bit sound) in QT even if it handles them in some other apps. QT just isn't as central to the scheme of things on a Windoze machine as it is on a Mac.
Irrespective of the encoding, you'll want to get you clip built in the FCP timeline and fully rendered. From there, my preference is to output a self-contained QT movie if I'm going to MPEG-2. While it's possible to output most any format directly, I don't favor this approach for MPEG-2 because I use Dolby AC-3 encoding for the audio and I like to hand A.Pack (the Dolby encoder) a QT movie for simplicity's sake.
A QT Movie (at highest quality) or an FCP Movie will maintain the original sound quality which is quite high. In MPEG-$, you'll want to pay some attention to the audio encoding specs since they bear on overall clip size and can often be reduced without much audio loss. FCP uses an audio spec that is higher than CD quality (48KHz/16-bit) which is cool if you're shipping a short clip as data via optical storage (CD/DVD) since it'll be played from hard drive in the end.
What you plan to do is probably the best way to learn these procedures, so "know your target" (understand what your friend can play), get the clip together, go to File>Export>, and try a couple of different possibilities for quality/size.
Post back your questions/problems, I'll be "in the area"...
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Currently on a loaded 2.5GHz G5 dualie/5GB/1TB internal RAID/dual 19" monitors. Final Cut Studio, Adobe Suite, Boris RED. Shooting with Canon.
VU California Crew, Inland Empire Sub-Chapter (paragraph?)
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Upgrade from FCP 4.5 to FCP 5.0
