Urgent help - Exporting FCP video

[conamor]

Hello,

I have imported thousands of clip of 1 minutes (3 days of security camera videos). (1080p) This was on 32GB card.

I have merged all of those in the timeline and stripped the audio.

When I want to export it it's now over 120GB.

What am I doing wrong and why is it doing this considering that the original files were below the 32GB?

Thank you for the help!

 

[whitestar27]

The original files are in a highly compressed format, FCP expands them when you edit.
What format are you trying to export in?

 

[richardallan]

The original files are in a highly compressed format, FCP expands them when you edit.
What format are you trying to export in?

Yes. You need to read up on Export Settings...

 

[lin2log]

The original files are in a highly compressed format, FCP expands them when you edit.

???​

Final Cut Pro most certainly does NOT "expand" clips when editing. 🙄
Any and all media is (of course) edited in their native format without any "expanding". What it renders the files in is another matter! Be it in the timeline or, as in this case, upon export. You can choose both. Upon export the file size is determined by various criteria such as resolution, color depth and most of all CODEC. And clearly you "conamor" are simply using the "Export File" destination without changing anything. In which case the project is exported in ProRes which is the codec for the best possible quality at the expense of file size! So maybe try something more sensible? Such as any of the "Apple Devices" destinations??

 

[whitestar27]

???​

Final Cut Pro most certainly does NOT "expand" clips when editing. 🙄
Any and all media is (of course) edited in their native format without any "expanding". What it renders the files in is another matter! Be it in the timeline or, as in this case, upon export. You can choose both. Upon export the file size is determined by various criteria such as resolution, color depth and most of all CODEC. And clearly you "conamor" are simply using the "Export File" destination without changing anything. In which case the project is exported in ProRes which is the codec for the best possible quality at the expense of file size! So maybe try something more sensible? Such as any of the "Apple Devices" destinations??

It absolutely does 'expand' clips, despite your inappropriately aggressive response. It HAS to decompress the files in order to edit with them, even just into RAM (ignoring optimised media here). Scrubbing would be very slow and glitchy if it just played back the original media without converting it (into, I'm assuming, ProRes). Do you even know how GOP based codecs work? If you rewound a clip and it was using the original without any transcoding it would have to jump back in the file until it found a key frame then read forward and reconstruct the intermediate frames, which would completely kill performance, especially at higher rewind speeds. IIRC this is why Resolve used to be so crap at scrubbing with H.264 media.

Edit: I just tried importing a weird H.264 clip into FCPX from my dash cam and it asked me what rendering to use, the options were all flavours of ProRes. So clearly it uses ProRes internally, which explains why it's so smooth at scrubbing

 

[e1me5]

No expansion is happening anywhere, playback is being handled by the hardware media decoders that are optimised for certain kinds of footage (h26x, Prores, etc). Original files don't change, but you have the option to transcode to a more efficient codec, to reduce the amount of horsepower needed to playback the footage in real time when you start adding effects etc, or for smaller files in case you work with big raw files that need a lot of bandwidth and disk space.

Rendering is when the system creates new files, usually temporary to assist performance when there is a lot going on and the system can't keep up with real time playback and to speed up exporting by using render files to transcode the deliverable. Again, different codecs are available for all kind of situations. You can option out of rendering or select which parts of the timeline to render to keep disk usage down.

The reason of why the export file is bigger than the originals is that FCPX by default renders to a higher quality and larger bitrate than source. You can change this by using an other preset, or by transcoding again the export file to a new one with lower quality and bit rate parameters. Compressor is a good app to use to do that, with plenty of customisation and it calculates the new file's size but a free alternative is Handbrake.

Good luck.

 

[ChrisA]

It absolutely does 'expand' clips, despite

This is wrong. Well, maybe it "expands" them one frame at a time, then discards the expanded data when it shows the next frame. OK, maybe there is a cache somewhere, but it gets discarded.

As others have said, simply pick the "right" export format, whatever you need, and it will do it.

 

[richardallan]

OK, maybe there is a cache somewhere, but it gets discarded.

As others have said, simply pick the "right" export format, whatever you need, and it will do it.

There definitely is a Cache and it can get quite large and it definitely doesn't get discarded automatically. You have to delete it yourself.

 

[lin2log]

There definitely is a Cache and it can get quite large and it definitely doesn't get discarded automatically. You have to delete it yourself.

Talk about conflating completely unrelated things. 🤦🏼‍♂️
What Final Cut Pro creates a cache for and what it fills it with – namely render files, analysis files, thumbnail images, and audio waveform files – and how the processor i.e. CPU/GPU decodes for playback have exactly nothing to do with each other.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Yeah…I think the OP was just talking about the exported movie estimated size being 120GB.