Sending FCP QuickTime Movies To A Windows User

Hi,

I'm cutting short videos for a website in FCP 5.1, and I need to send them to the web designer for conversion to Flash, but he has a PC and we've had trouble with the file format. He has QuickTime for Windows on his PC, but even though I added the .mov suffix on the file name and made sure there were no spaces in the title, he was having trouble. What's the best way to send self-contained finished FCP QuickTime movies to someone using Windows?

Jeff

Try Flip4mac

Link here

QuickTime is just the outer layer of the file. Internally, QuickTimes can be made in hundreds of different versions.

If you save the work as Sorenson3 QuickTime, it should open up in PC QuickTime just fine.

And yes, don't put in spaces or any punctuation marks. Underline "_" is OK and you can use upper and lower case for longer names:

MyMightyGreat_AnimationMovie.mov

That's being compulsive, but that does work.

Just adding mov to the end of the file doesn't make it a standard QuickTime file. You need to force your Mac to show you file extensions and you may be surprised to find that .mov is already there.

Finder, Preferences, Advanced.

Koz

You can use Quicktime Conversion to create a DV25 or DVCPro50 AVI. Those may only work if your compressionist has the appropriate codec installed.

I've sent DV25 .mov files to a Windows box for encoding but there is a 2GB source file size limit but that may depend on his compression app.

As Koz points out it, a lot depends on what codes is inside that .mov.

Episode and probably a few other Mac compression apps (MPEGStreamclip?) may be able to convert your source to .avi but again even that may depend on what the avi wraps.

If you need to got the .wmv route I'd suggest using 1 Pass VBR with a very high Quality setting (even 100 if you can handle the large file). You can do this in Flip4Mac (which can also work inside Squeeze and Cleaner as well as Compressor) or Episode.

Maybe a very high data rate MPEG2 Program Stream might work too. I've used that to distribute broadcast spots through DGFastchannel.

If your web designer can give you the encode specs (data rate, frame rate, frame size), why not create the FLV file yourself which they can then integrate into the web page.