90min video in Final Cut to CD-ROM Help
 

Dear All, We have a problem! and are seeking your much needed advice.

We have produced a video that runs for 90mins in total and our client would like the finished product to be on CD. I realise that this is a long duration to fit on a CD.

We are using Final Cut Pro 4.1.1 and we would like to ideally export it on .mpg, is this possible?

I have tried for ages to find the right settings that produce good quality video and audio, but without success.

It seems everytime i try a different setting, the file size is too big, and the video quality is bad.

Given that an audio CD holds about 70 minutes of audio it should be clear that you aren't going to get 90 minutes of audio and video onto a CD without incredible amounts of compression. A CD will hold about 700 Mbyte of data so a 90 minute recording would have to be at 700/90/60 = .130 Mbyte/sec or about 1 Mbit/Sec. Normal mpeg encoding is typically at 4.5 MBPS. You probably can fit it onto a CD but would have to reduce the resolution appreciably. Going from 720 x 480 to 360 x 240 would, for example, get you a reduction of x4 in required data rate.

Only way I can see it working is using an MPEG-4 format such as DIVX or XVID. You can regularly fit feature length movies onto a CD-R with wonderful a/v quality.

The major drawback to this method is your users have to have the right codecs to be able to watch the video and most will likely not have it, nor want to install it.

Export using Compressor. Use the preset called MPEG-4 Improved NTSC for CD. That has a bitrate of 1000kbps. If you need to squeeze it smaller, experiment. Use the variable bit rate setting. Reduce the bitrate and lower the audio to 22.500 and frame rate to 24. etc

If your client is willing to upgrade to QT 7, then use a QuickTime preset but change the compressor to H.264.