Exporting Sequence of Old School Footage

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Level 1

6 points

Exporting Sequence of Old School Footage

I have something I shot on a small standard personal PAL camera 8 years ago and I edited it into a 40 minute sequence. When I export as is, I get a 13 GB file which is way too massive. I am wondering if there is a way to export it so it still looks good but is smaller? Settings are:

Frame: 720x576

Aspect Ratio: CCIR601/ DVPAL 5:4

Pixel Aspect Ratio: PAL-CCIR 601 (720x576)

Field Dominance: Lower (Even)

Editing Timebase: 25

Compressor: DVPAL

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Aug 29, 2015 3:46 AM

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Answer 1

Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,555 points

Aug 29, 2015 11:27 AM in response to MollyDB

What do you want to do with the file?

For most general purposes:

Take the exported file into Compressor and transcode the file using the H.264 codec to reduce the file size.

The H.264 codec is ubiquitous, platform independent and gives good results with a tremendous decrease in file size.

MtD

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Answer 2

Sep 1, 2015 5:55 AM in response to MollyDB

Meg The Dog is correct; how the file will be delivered or displayed ultimately determines how it should be exported. For example, Meg's advice for H.264 would be the typical export setting used in Compressor for files that are delivered for web viewing, or just plain old file based viewing (delivered on thumb drive, HDD or other means). But if the final delivery is DVD, then you'd export from FCP as a self-contained movie, and use one of the DVD setting in Compressor. The DVD settings will produce two files; an MPEG-2 (.m2v) video file and and AC3 audio file. Those two then go to DVD Studio Pro for disc authoring.

There are dozens of other settings based on different delivery methods, so you need to determine that before proceeding.

-DH

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