Exporting HD from Final Cut Express
 

Hi guys,
When I export my 1080i60 footage out of FCE, I seem to lose a lot of the richness of the color and the sharpness/clarity of the overall picture. I have been exporting with the following settings:
-MP4 using H.264
-5000 kbps
-1280x720
-keyframing = 24
-frame rate = current

The issue is that when I view the film within FCE, it looks spectacularly vibrant and sharp and I thought I would be able to retain much of that with the settings I just listed.
Any suggestions would be great!
-Steve

Nothing? I'm the only one with this problem? Blast!
-Steve

I don't know what help I can be, we aren't shooting HD as of yet. However, what was your source footage? If you export as a self contained file out of FC (using sequence settings, no compression), how does the resulting QT file look?

Just trying to narrow down the source of the issue....

Mike

My source footage was HDV imported from an XH-A1 and captured as Apple Intermediate Codec. I haven't done a full quality Quicktime export yet, only the MP4 for the web... I'll do a Qtime export and get back to you. Thanks for the help Mike!

You are compressing your image a heck of a lot when you export to web, you are going to lose richness and vibrant colours with those settings, without a doubt. Nothing you can do about it really, apart from play around with your settings until you are happy with them.

(Also, other changes in colour may be related to gamma differences in the native Final Cut timeline and in regular quicktime environment this is quite a complicated area that i'm not really qualified to go into detailed explanation about - sufficive to say I know it's an issue for some projects.)