Compressor - Exporting from final cut pro - Lynda

Let's start by taking a look at Final Cut Pro 6 and I have loaded one of our exercise files into it, the file called 'New England'. Now the process of exporting video is the same regardless of what video format you are working with, but if you wanted something to play with the New England file is a good choice. When it comes time to export your file, load the sequence that you want to export into your timeline. Make sure the timeline window is selected, then go up to file, go down to export and although it looks like you have a lot of choices, it really comes down to two, QuickTime Movie and using Compressor. I always urge people to use export QuickTime Movie. There is a slight benefit to using Compressor if you are principally exporting motion templates that have not been rendered, but seeing as using Compressor takes many, many times longer than real-time and the quality is essentially the same, I opt for both high-quality and speed by recommending QuickTime Movie. When you click on Export - QuickTime Movie you get to give your sequence a name, in this case we will call it 'My movie' and store it to whatever you think it's going to be stored, I am going to store it to our 2nd drive. Settings, Current Settings always equals to settings of your current sequence. This is the highest quality that you can get out of the video that you've edited onto your timeline, my recommendation is leave it set to Current Settings. The Audio and Video, and video settings are self-evident. Markers, if you want to include markers as part of the compressed video you are going to be using in the DVD Studio Pro be sure to select DVD Studio Pro Markers, this is the one choice that works the most reliably. If you are setting your Settings to Current Settings, Recompress All Frames is never checked. This leaves you only two choices, whether you want to make the movie self-contained or whether you want to make the movie your reference file. There are two types of QuickTime movies; there is a Self-Contained QuickTime Movie and a Reference QuickTime Movie. A Self-Contained QuickTime Movie contains all of your audio and all of your rendered files and all of your video files all gathered together into one gigantic file. A Reference Movie on the other hand contains all of your audio fully-mixed but pointers that point to your rendered files and your video files. If the purpose of exporting this file is simply to last long enough to get it compressed, make the movie not self-contained. If the purpose of the movie is to be given to somebody else to play on their system, or to be stored on your system for a long period of time or you are trying to solve an output problem, or you are working with HDV then the movie must be self-contained. Seeing this, I am the one that does my own movie compression on my own system. I almost never make the movie self-contained, it's significantly faster, and the quality is identical. So to prove the point let's make this movie self-contained, be sure the self-contained checkbox is checked and click 'Save' and in a few seconds, two... three... four... five... six... seven... about eight seconds the movie is exported to, let's do the exact thing. We will export QuickTime Movie, everything is the same, 'My movie', call it a Reference Movie and leave these the same, uncheck that, see how long it takes to export and it's done. So it took about a half-a-second to export the movie if it's a Reference Movie, took about eight seconds to export it if it's a Self-Contained Movie. It's about 20 times faster to export your movie as a Reference Movie. So let's take a look at these two movies that we saved to our second drive. If I open up the Self-Contained Movie and get info on it, it's a 171 megabytes. I open up the Reference Movie and get info on that, it's 4.3 megabytes. The difference is, this contains the video, this points to the video, yet if we would open both of these and play both of these, or just open these with QuickTime, there is movie number one and there is movie number two, they are exactly the same, they are bit identical if you would have compared them. QuickTime is able to easily play reference movies or self-contained movies and they both have exactly the same quality. Let's just quit out of here and go back to Final Cut, so to get your files out of Final Cut you go to File - Export - QuickTime Movie, if you are going to keep it on your system keep it a Reference Movie, if you are going to save it for long period of time or give it to somebody else make it a Self-Contained Movie, and go ahead and export it. Then you take that movie and bring it in the Compressor, this gives you the greatest flexibility, the highest quality and it gives you the fastest export time out of Final Cut. Just take a look at how we get movies out of LiveType next.