Exporting 2 hours of video

I am trying to export a 2 hour long video. I have been using Final Cut for a long time but have never produced a film this long before and I am having difficulty exporting it to a quicktime file in order to put it into iDVD to burn. The video is 2 hours longs and when i try to export as a Quicktime file, it is over 70GB which I do not have enough room for. Then when I use Quicktime Conversion and change the size to 1920 x 1080 HD, it says the estimated time is 38 hours and keeps going up as time goes on.. I think I am doing something wrong since I dont think it should be taking that long to export.

Please let me know if you can help! Thanks!

Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Apr 13, 2011 4:53 PM

Apr 15, 2011 4:59 PM in response to jackie99

Hello Jackie,

Clearing the disk space should help, and it's something you need to do even if you were not having any problems exporting a movie from FCE.

After clearing the space & emptying trash, do the following:

1. Do both of the rendering commands that I mentioned in my earlier post. +If your clip properties all really do match your sequence settings+ and you have not applied any effects, these rendering commands should only take a few seconds to run and they will not generate any sizable render files. If rendering takes significant time, something else is wrong and we will have to discover what it is.
..... +Sequence > Render All > Both+ and
..... +Sequence > Render Only > Mixdown+

2. Export to *QT Movie*

3. UNcheck the option called +Make Movie Self Contained+

4. Save the exported movie to your internal hard drive in order to reduce the load on your external hard drive while you are exporting. That way FCE is not reading and writing to the same drive at the same time.

The export process should only take a few minutes; and the QT reference movie should be pretty small ... if it's over 1-2GB something else is wrong.

You can import the reference movie into iDVD to create your iDVD project. The size of the imported file is irrelevant. The important measure is how long in time your video is. iDVD can fit up to about 2 hours of video on single-layer DVD media. You don't do the condensing; iDVD does.