Final Cut Studio share/export SLOW

[chasechance]

About a month ago (August 2010) I bought a brand new MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB memory 1067 MHZ DDR3) and installed Final Cut Studio. I used to have a PowerBook G4 from 2002.

Anyway, I used to edit a lot of simple video on my old PowerBook G4 using iMovie HD, which I just loved because of its simplicity (I used it to teach 7 year old kids how to edit their own music videos...). I've found the New iMovie such a unfriendly program that I've decided to finally buckle down and learn Final Cut.

I have found several times however, that my brand new mac and FCS sometimes take longer than my 9 year old mac and iMovie HD to export the SAME video! How on earth is this possible?! I've noticed this several times now, with both machines running side by side!

I was trying to export a 6 minute video from FCS and it took nearly 3 hours, and iMovie HD took under 10 minutes!!! What am I doing wrong, what should I change my settings to?

 

[-DH]

I was trying to export a 6 minute video from FCS and it took nearly 3 hours, and iMovie HD took under 10 minutes!!! What am I doing wrong, what should I change my settings to?

Some details would help. What video codecs are you working with in both programs? What video codecs are you exporting to in both programs? What export method are you using in both programs?

-DH

 

[puckhead193]

check your sequence settings/video settings. They should match. When in doubt drag a clip to the timeline a message will pop up saying they don't match, click yes. All is fixed.

 

[chasechance]

Wow! Thanks for the quick replies! The video I imported into both programs was originally from a DVD that I used Handbrake to convert into a m4v file (142 mb size). It was video of me appearing on TV news with some students, and the TV station burnt me a copy of the segment to a DVD... The video was originally 8 1/2 minutes long. I brought it into the programs to trim the beginning and end off so that I could upload it to youtube. In both cases I tried to export it to a .mov file, using the 'Share' preset setting in iMovie and the new 'Share' function in FCS. I didn't customize anything!

A similar thing happened a few weeks ago when I tried to burn a DVD from Final Cut Studio, again using the 'share' function. It went onto transcode or whatever it's called for 9 hours before I finally had to give up because I had to go home from work!

 

[-DH]

The video I imported into both programs was originally from a DVD that I used Handbrake to convert into a m4v file (142 mb size).

There's your problem; MPEG-4 is NOT an editing codec and doesn't work in FCP natively. Handbrake is totally the wrong tool for converting a DVD's VOB files to an editing format. Use MPEG Streamclip or DVDxDV.

-DH