i had just finish shooting my vacation video in hi definition using iphone4. quality was great. Sometimes i use imovie and this time i tried final cut express on my macbook air. I prefer to use imovie coz its faster and easier than FCP but then in final cut express, i can custom made the font to 3d font or anything i like. The question is- What is the best format for export and keep back up in future? i had tried fews and the best seems to be exporting to quicktime and choose format quicktime>h264 and the file seems smaller than the rest. For youtube, i will export again to export quicktime and choose Apple TV and seems is fits my requirement and the file size also smaller. Whats ur setting for backup in future guys? i believe must be the best quality coz in future we need to re-edit it.
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which export setting for backup video or final product
- Thread starter roslee7
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Do you only want to save the finished edit but nothing of the raw footage? If that is the case, export the finished sequence as .mov file using the Apple Intermediate Codec for video and Uncompressed for audio, but know, that one hour will use 25GB of storage capacity.
As the footage is using the H264 codec, why not save the originals you copied from the iPhone, if you want to store the raw footage?
thanks bro for your info. sorry its not that clear enough for u. Example, i took few shorts in HD quality on my iphone4 and i dont want to back up the seperate files coz it will be messy. I want to combine all the files into one and export in good quality as in raw. In future, i can import this files again and re-edit in imovie or final cut. I wanna good quality but its better with less file size. Normally my video vacation is like seperated into 3-4 files and like day 1, 2, 3,4 etc and each files about 5-7 mins coz due to youtube restriction. For youtube upload, i just export using apple tv setting coz after that i will delete them. u can watch my video channel. www.youtube.com/roslee7
What about creating folders for every day, then nest them into a weekly or monthly folder and so on?
In there you put the daily files you have.
Or you could just use FCE and combine every day into one sequence and export that file either as .mp4 (H264, AAC) or .mov (AIC, Uncompressed), if you use .mov, you don't need to render the file any time you change a value in the timeline, as H264 and AAC are not codecs meant for editing, but only for distributing.
Anyway, you have to decide what is more important, file size (an external TB HDD costs less than 80 nowadays) or saving time later, when you don't need to render every change in the timeline just because you used a good editing codec like Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC).
Personally, I would store the daily files in its original format and whenever I need to edit with them, I would use MPEG Streamclip to properly transcode them. And the finished edit would be saved as uncompressed as it gets.
In there you put the daily files you have.
Or you could just use FCE and combine every day into one sequence and export that file either as .mp4 (H264, AAC) or .mov (AIC, Uncompressed), if you use .mov, you don't need to render the file any time you change a value in the timeline, as H264 and AAC are not codecs meant for editing, but only for distributing.
Anyway, you have to decide what is more important, file size (an external TB HDD costs less than 80 nowadays) or saving time later, when you don't need to render every change in the timeline just because you used a good editing codec like Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC).
Personally, I would store the daily files in its original format and whenever I need to edit with them, I would use MPEG Streamclip to properly transcode them. And the finished edit would be saved as uncompressed as it gets.
The following setting is the one I would use with FCE and the footage I want toe edit.
For backing up the original raw footage, just use the files the iPhone gives you and transcode them whenever you want to edit them.
If you have enough HDD space, you can also just keep the transcoded files, but they take 25GB/h.
For the final edit, I would at least save one copy as .mov using the settings above, and maybe another copy (via Handbrake maybe) as .mp4/.mov using the H264 codec for video and the AA codec (AAC) for audio.
Transcode is the technical term for converting a video or audio file from one format (.mov, .mp4, ...) to another (or even the same) format, but changing the codec (H264, Divx, Xvid, AIC, ...).
If you are just looking to archive for the time being, convert to h.264. Its a smaller size and higher quality. The only drawback is that if you want to edit in the future you need to transcode to a different file format before editing
The part about it being a smaller file size is true, but not higher quality. H.264 is heavily compressed and is recommended as a delivery format, not an archive format.