Exporting to Quicktime & Quicktime Conversion

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I am exporting a very BIG project from Final Cut. I am about to attempt to export it to my external hard drive because there isn't enough room on my mac laptop. Its been exporting all day

I was exporting to Quicktime conversion. I have exported to just Quicktime and to Quicktime conversion on different occasions.

What is the difference in exporting to Quicktime and Quicktime conversion besides the size of the file and the time it takes to export?


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[knightly]

Depends on how you have it setup...I'm sure Oakstreet has more specifics here, but quicktime gives you basically 2 options, that is to have a self contained movie or to leave it as a reference movie that contains none of the actual footage, just what amounts to an EDL (Edit Decision List)...I use the latter to go to DVD Studio Pro for brevity...it'll have to be encoded later anyway in DVDSP.

With the quicktime export, you regain all of the quality options that you eschew by going with a straight quicktime (full quality all the time + huge files) export. You can change bandwidth options and format options plus change the output frame rate to allow for higher quality low frame rate options at the 100Mb limit for youtube...for instance if you output at 15fps on a 30p/60i project, you will end up with a file that's roughly half the size...so you can increase the quality of the indivual frames by increasing the bandwidth.

 

[oakstreetphotovideo]

The really short answer is that "export to Quicktime" exports a Quicktime movie using your sequence settings (essentially, full quality).

Whereas, export using Quicktime conversion defaults to H.264 compression and allows you to set many options, as Knightly pointed out. It will generally take a lot longer to export using conversion, because your timeline will be converted and/or compressed, which can take a very long time.

For a fast export that retains all of the original quality, use "export to Quicktime".

 

[clive]

If you're using Final Cut Studio, you may find it's quicker to export using Compressor

Quicktime is an incredibly slow piece of software... but Compressor does the same thing, but faster. Often about twice the speed.

There is a bit of a learning curve to get the best out of it... especially if you're working 16:9, as all export software seem to default to 4:3... but it's worth the effort.

 

[spinner]

Compressor is the next thing in exporting I want to figure out, but I didn't want to brave new territory on a project that I am just finishing.

This particular project was an event of sorts, a big dance where the girls wore evening wear and had young gentlemen in tuxedos on their arms. Since it was important, I didn't want to 'try' anything new.

In terms of my ongoing situation with my laptop hard drive, I moved everything to my external and freed up some space, that quickly was filled by the QuickTime conversion export. Luckily, I did do a 'regular' QuickTime export first which took about a couple of hours to export, QuickTime conversion took a day to export. (the project ended up being an hour and 24 minutes long).

I was asking about the differences because I had been wondering if the quality of the final product would be affected in a very visible manner, meaning if someone watched it --who isn't a filmmaker--would the quality be as good and would they notice.

Right now the new development is that the project is so long that it transfers to DVD, but did not finalize. I played about 5 minutes of it and it seems to be playing, but I would like to be sure that it will be viewable even without the final steps of iDVD finishing the DVD itself....without causing any problems to the DVD player or only playing once or something like that (what do I know? )

As I said, it seems to be playing...

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