Final Cut Movie to DVD Studio Pro

[Jens]

Hallo there,

I am at a loss with this so any suggestions would be HUGELY appreciated.

I've got a 2hr sequence made up of various clips saved as a Final Cut project which I'm trying to burn to a DVD using DVD Studio Pro.

What I don't understand is that the Final Cut project is only about 600KB. I exported it as a QT Movie, brought it into DVD Studio Pro as a new project to burn, but by then it had become approx 4.8 GB.

I'm now splitting the video into 4 parts but it's still taking ages to burn (30-40 minutes for 30 minutes of footage and of roughly 2GB each part). Is this the norm for exporting and burning to take so long?

I have 48.17 available GB on my hard drive - surely this is enough?

Many thanks in advance
Jens

 

[chelseasian]

Because of the way FCP is designed, it is non-destructive to your original footage that is why your FCP project file is small. It is basically only keeping a set of instructions telling the app what to do to the video files you have assembled together. I.e. your transitions, your edits, titles etc.

Hence when you export to Quicktime, it takes all the instructions you have given, and produce the final footage, it becomes a big file. Think of the whole process like baking a cake: FCP is the mixer bowl, the eggs, flour, sugar are your video footage. You mix them together and put them in the oven. The mixture rises in the oven. When you take it out, the mixture has grown significantly in size.

What you need to realise also is that the mov file you have created from FCP is the raw QT file that is the highest quality. Instead of dragging in directly into DVD Pro where it will then compress it to a m2v file, you can drag the file into Compressor and use Compressor's presets to create the m2v and audio files. After which you should notice a reduction in file size.

Then drag the newly created m2v and aiff files into DVD Studio Pro and burn your disc.

Good luck!

 

[AviationFan]

Think of the whole process like baking a cake: FCP is the mixer bowl, the eggs, flour, sugar are your video footage. You mix them together and put them in the oven. The mixture rises in the oven. When you take it out, the mixture has grown significantly in size.

Good analogy. I would add that the Final Cut project file is like the receipe for this cake, which is why it can be so small.

Jens, you can also create the m2v files (which are MPEG-2 encoded video files) directly from Final Cut by using the "Export->Using Compressor..." option. It locks up Final Cut Pro during the (rather lengthy) encoding process, but it doesn't fill your hard drive with potentially much larger intermediate QuickTime files.

- Martin