Final Cut Express 4-Panasonic HDC-TM300 best possible export quality

[eInfinity]

I am going to soon get FCE 4 as I currently use iMovie '08 and it exports in terrible quality and I need more features. I heard FCE 4 also has bad export quality. I have a Panasonic HDC-TM300 and I want to export it in the high defenition, so what options should I use when I am exporting video for the highest possible quality? I am using the 1st generation intel Alluminium iMac (I think it was released 2007 . @2.4 GHz)

 

[spinnerlys]

Do you want to export the final sequence as a file or back to tape?

 

[eInfinity]

File

I want to export it as a Full HD file in the best possible quality.

 

[spinnerlys]

Then FCE will be more than fine, but iMovie should get you similar results anyway.

What HD footage settings do you use in iMovie and what settings do you use to export from iMovie?

And what do you plan to do with the exported file, if you don't mind my asking?

 

[eInfinity]

FCE-iMovie

When I tried to export video on iMovie '08 it was pixelated. I tried AVI and MPEG-4. I will get FCE 4 for the features anyway as iMovie is too restricted. What I wanted to know is what are the maximum possible settings I can use for FCE to export in Full HD. I plan to export it to YouTube Full HD and possibly put it on Blu-Ray later.

 

[spinnerlys]

.avi is a container for a variety of codecs, the most popular being Divx and Xvid, which are varieties of the MPEG-4 codec.

MPEG-4 is a codec which also comes in many clothes, H264 for example, or the aforementioned Divx/Xvid.

Those MPEG-4 codecs are for content distribution, maximum visible image quality with a minimum of file size.

YouTube currently uses the MPEG-4 codec variant called H264, so you should be fine if you use that and use the proper settings (enough bit-rate and maybe even more than one pass of encoding).

For your information, FCE can use many export settings, many of them will result in very big files (1GB/min).

If you finally get FCE you can try two ways of exporting.
1. FCE with settings to export to a H264 encoded video file
or
2. FCE to export with settings to export to a big a not MPEG-4 compressed file, and then use MPEG Streamclip (or some other software) to convert that big file to a smaller H264 encoded video.

 

[eInfinity]

Files

Thankyou