fcp 6 playback issues....HELP!

[Ryan Morey]

Hi Everyone,

I'm having some trouble both playing back my project in fcp and exporting.I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.I have mixed footage from my 5d and my A1 both are set to 30f.I finished up my little trailer and when I'm playing back it just stops and a warning pops up.It says change unlimited rt (it's set to safe),increase computer speed,or increase drive speed.I have 7200rpm drives and an imac with 4 gigs of ram.I managed to export one quicktime movie and it starts to play choppy and then just stops,but the music keeps playing .......eeeeerg.I'm obviously a noob at this I'd really appreciate some help.Any feedback would be wonderful.I need to get this done tomorrow for my client if possible.

Thanks!
Ryan

[Edward Carlson]

If there's a red or orange render bar in FCP's timeline, you need to render the video so it can play without skips. If that doesn't fix it, then your computer just isn't fast enough to handle full resolution HD. What processor do you have (you said iMac, but those have been made from 233MHz PPC up to 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo.)

[Ryan Morey]

Hi Edward,

Thanks for replying. My imac is the 2.16 processor.I did render everything so it wasn't that.I wound up changing the sequence settings to custom 16:9 and the quicktime video setting to hdv 1080p30 and that helped once I re-rendered everything.Now it plays straight through beautifully.I exported the quicktime movie straight through fcp and it looks good and plays smoothly.Now I just have to figure out how to compress it for my website.It has to be smaller then 10mb.I exported the same project to compressor and it doesn't want to cooperate for some reason.It says it has 540 frames to process and then it never progresses.It just says unknown time to finish.Is there something else I should try? Please help!

Thanks:)
Ryan

[Edward Carlson]

Yeah, Compressor is a pain in the butt. I haven't used Compressor 2, but there are lots of posts about fixing Compressor's problems, just do a Google search.

[Ryan Morey]

Cool.....thanks! I just tried using the other quicktime export option in the fcp export menu and I was able to get it quite a bit smaller,but not small enough.I'll hit google

Thanks again!
Ryan

[Nigel Barker]

Use the excellent & free MPEG Streamclip to convert the finished Quicktime movie to a lower bit rate & smaller file size. Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows

Cheers

Nigel

[Ryan Morey]

Hi Nigel,

I downloaded the software and it looks great.I just can't get the file down to 10mb.Is there a trick to it?

Ryan

[Mitchell Lewis]

How long (in minutes or seconds) is the clip?

[Ryan Morey]

It's only 2 minutes long.I wound up just uploading it to vimeo and embedding it in my blog.I'd still like to be able to convert clips from quicktime to small flv files so they'll play directly in my site instead of as a pop up quicktime.

Ryan

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Ryan Morey

I downloaded the software and it looks great.I just can't get the file down to 10mb.Is there a trick to it?

It all depends on resolution, quality & CODEC. Use H.264 (modern Flash Players V9 & newer play this & it's better quality than FLV).

I have been converting 5DII footage to 3.2Mbps H.264 @1280x720p & that runs out at about 10MB per minute so you will have to live with lower quality than that if you want 5Mbps.

Cheers

Nigel