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Beach Guy

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 7, 2011
44
0
The movie I created with my 4th grade class ended up being almost 12 gb. In past years, I would burn each student a dvd...is it even possible to burn a file this large? I started reading about Compressor, but I've never used it before. I edited this year's class project for the first time using FCP X on my Imac. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm a total newbie when it comes to most of this stuff.
 
Now I'm thinking that maybe my export settings in FCP X are set too high.
 
Here's what you do. Compressor can automatically fit large projects on a DVD, regardless of their capacity when exported. Take your highest quality export, and make that your Target in a blank project in Compressor. Under the "Disc Burning" presets, you want MPEG-2 encoding, and Dolby Digital Professional for audio. Drag them one at a time onto your "Target". Select the MPEG-2, and go under "Quality" and set to 2 Pass VBR Best. Leave the Dolby Digital Professional alone. Then click on your target in Compressor (the space outside of the MPEG-2 and Dolby but within that whole rectangular space of the object) and in the inspector, go to Job Action. Select Create DVD. You can put in a title, and choose whether to "Play Automatically" or "Go To Menu" when the disc is put in a DVD player. Compressor will fit your 12GB file onto the DVD using the best quality compression while getting it within the 4.7GB capacity.
 
Thank you very much for the detailed instructions. I've wanted to get Motion ever since I purchased FCP X...now I will get it. Today, I exported the project in H.264 format and that cut down the size of the movie tremendously. I was able to then burn the entire movie onto a dvd. The quality was decent. Would using Motion allow me to produce a better quality? Again, thanks. I'm really learning a lot...although it's been a little crazy with it being the end of the school year. I appreciate the info.
 
Would using Motion allow me to produce a better quality? Again, thanks. I'm really learning a lot...although it's been a little crazy with it being the end of the school year. I appreciate the info.

Do you realise that Motion is essentially motion graphics software and compressor is for video encoding/transcoding.

Using motion wouldn't allow you to get any better quality in the video image. The only way you could increase the perceived quality with motion would be to add fancy motion graphics or explosions etc.
 
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