How are you exporting 1080i60 (or 50) and how are you viewing it?

Hi,
if you want to see your HD work back to the LCD TV, you can either watch it using your tape camcorder (if that is what you have) or burn a Blu ray disk.
If the first case applies to you, you just need to use the print to tape option from your finished timeline and your montage will be transferred back to tape.
Then you can connect your camcorder to the TV using the component cable or HDMI if you have it on the camera.

Otherwise to go the Blu ray route, you can export your timeline as a QuickTime movie (do not use the QuickTime conversion method) and then you can use Toast 9 (or the latest 10) together with a Blu ray burner. Then you need to have a Blu ray player to watch on TV. This route is much expensive.
With Toast 9 you can also burn a 20 minutes Blu ray into standard DVD, so to use your Mac's superdrive. But not all Blu ray players will be able to play it (I think Sony PS3 will play it).

Regards,
Armando.

I export to H.264 with a pretty high bit rate (10-20 Mbps) at 720p or 1080p. Thus I get an ISO standard movie file I can play on my media center or any computer at an OK size.

It really depends on what you want to view your content on. One of the problems of viewing content on computer screens is that we sit so close we tend to see every little defect and imperfection in the video. That being said...

You need something to play the file back. This can be a taped-based camcorder with the necessary outputs or it can be another device. There are countless "Network Media Streams" out from companies like D-Link and Linksys, as well as hard drive based solutions from a company like Western Digital. These devices will all play .mp4 files, which you can easily create through Export with QuickTime Conversion or using another applications such as Compressor or MPEG Streamclip. Two other excellent options are the XBox 360 and the PS3. Personally I own the PS3 because it'll play a wide variety of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (h.264) material, including transport streams, program streams, and files. The Apple TV is another option, but is hamstrung by it's lack of power, and therefore can't play anything higher than 720p @ 24 fps or 540p @ 30 fps.

My recommendation is a PS3, even if you don't like gaming and you can swing it in your budget. Blu-ray support plus media streaming (via UPNP, which you do have to add seperately to your Mac, but Media Link costs $20) make it ideal. Plus it is robust in power and won't hiccup at high bitrate files like the Apple TV will.

When I encode (I use the Adobe Suite to encode but the bitrates can be similar for QuickTime) I encode with h.264 at 25 Mbps. High yes - but I've got nothing to lose since it's my own network and my own disk space.

I am assuming you want to deliver via computer?

I've been encoding all the camera demos for Canon's site, in 1080p (as well as smaller resolutions).

You can see some of the clips here:
http://usa.canon.com/app/html/SeeTheDifference/index.shtml

Here my workflow:

1. export from FCP as PNG QT
step-by-step procedure is here:
http://www.dvcreators.net/how-do-i-export-a-high-quality-movie/

2. Use SampleLab in DV Kitchen to ascertain the optimum recipe for encoding your content- the movie here shows the process:
http://www.dvcreators.net/dv-kitchen/features/samplelab/

(tip: use DV Kitchen's x264 codec, not the stock H.264 which "washes out" the image)

Hope this helps.

Message was edited by: Josh Mellicker

Josh, thank you for sharing a great tip. From what the website says (with excellent references) this x264 codec sounds great. H.264 really washes out colors for which I use a workaround oversaturating the colors in FCE. Two questions though:

1. Wouldn't DV kitchen workflow prove much more time and processor intensive compared to the straight quicktime H.264 encode? Could you share your experiences, please?

2. Have you yourself found any good workaround for the washed-out-color problem?

Thanks!
Roman