Quicktime / exporting broadcast quality clips

Dear FCP experts:

I have hired a company to build a website for my travel film stock footage library. I am converting 40 years of travel footage into downloadable clips for a stock footage website. The company is buildling the site but I am supplying the material by converting the footage into clips and placing them on an external hard drive which I am then sending to them to upload onto a dedicated server. I am confused about how to export the clips to the external hard drive.

1) If I export the clip as quicktime movie "current settings" I can reimport it and the quality is fine. But if I look at it on quicktime player it looks awful.

2) If I export the clip as uncompressed 8 bit or 10 bit (excuse my ignorance, what is the difference between 8 and 10 bit?) the clip looks great in quicktime player but when I go to reimport it is says it isn't supported and I have to render the clip when I drag it onto the timeline - and then it looks lousy and is not useable.

I don't want to invest the next six months cutting and exporting 25,000 clips and have them not useable.

The company building the site is PC based (I know...) and they are having trouble telling me how to export the clips.

Any advice?

Doug Jones

8 bit and 10 bit are, very basically, quality settings. For downloading, 10 bit could be overkill, because it makes huge file sizes.

The reason you have to render it on re-import is that it no longer matches your timeline settings, so FCP is having to convert it to be whatever your timeline settings are.

I think your best bet is to do some research. Go to some other stock footage sites and see what codecs they use, the file sizes they make and the quality of their product. Then you can make a more informed decision about what you want to offer your customers.

Of course we can help step you through doing whatever it is you want to do once you get a better idea of where you want to go.

Usually it's a low res file for preview (mpg4, or some other web codec with a small frame size), and a high res file if anyone buys it.

Also, what's your source footage? You don't have to convert it to 10 bit Uncompressed if it's a compressed source like DV or DV50. That will just explode the size of the file with no increase in quality.



www.strypesinpost.com

I don't know what corbett's talking about...those are not "Broadcast" (NTSC) settings.

You should have a small H.264 or MPEG-4 clip for an example. The main clips should be universally accepted or you will alienate yourself from specific users. The stock library I frequent uses the following full res settings:

SD (720 x 486) / 29.97 fps = Photo-JPEG codec / 38 mbits/s
HD (1920 x 1080) / 29.97 fps = Photo-JPEG codec / 66.9 mbits/s

The difference between 8 bit & 10 bit is the Color Depth of the pixels. If you want "Broadcast clients" to purchase your clips, I would stick with 10-Bit even if it results in larger files.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

P-Jpeg is an 8 bit RGB codec. Apple does not have a 10 bit RGB codec (not talking about 3rd party codecs here).

Also, double check for cross platform compatibility, especially for users who do not have Final Cut (PC users as well).

P-Jpeg, None, Animation, Png are native Quicktime Pro codecs, not too sure about Uncompressed 4:2:2, but I don't think it is without additional third party support.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote

P-Jpeg is an 8 bit RGB codec.

Um...no, G. Photo-JPEG supports 24-Bit Color / 8-Bit Greyscale images.

Quote

Apple does not have a 10 bit RGB codec (not talking about 3rd party codecs here)

Um...incorrect again, G:

Apple Uncompressed 10-Bit Codec
Apple ProRes HQ 10-Bit 4:2:2 Codec

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

When people say "8-bit" they're almost always talking about eight bits per component, not eight bits total per pixel. So what the print and computer guys call "24-bit color" is actually eight bits each for R, G and B.

And ProRes and Uncompressed are both YUV codecs, not RGB codecs. What's more, they're both 4:2:2, meaning there's twice as much luma resolution as chroma resolution.

All that said, all the newer HD stock footage I've seen on Getty is delivered in ProRes now. Since so much of the stuff originates on 4:2:2 formats anyway, there's no point in going to 4:4:4, or to RGB. But for material that originated on film and will be used in film workflows, a 4:4:4 RGB option is a very, very good thing to have.

Boy did I screw this one up...

That's not how it was taught to me, Jeff...but you are probably correct.

...and I seemed to have overlooked that little "RGB" in G's post I was concentrating too hard on the 10-Bit part.

Good lord...too many tryptophan sandwiches for me. I should put down the turkey & start drinking again * hic *

BTW...the Artbeats footage I have been downloading is all Photo-JPEG. I am glad at least one of these houses (Getty Images) is adopting ProRes - nice color space / smaller file sizes / very compatible file format for us FCP users

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Worked too hard over Thanksgiving, Joe!


www.derekmok.com

...it's not even a holiday for me anymore

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Dear Jude and everyone who has responded to my post regarding broadcast quality clips:

I appreciate all of your comments and help. I did solve the quicktime player problem (just some setting changes)

The original source material of the stock footage library is 16mm. It was transfered standard def and imported into the Mac with DV Cam - so that is the quality and resolution level I am working with. I wish I could retransfer all of it into High Def but that is not in my budget for a 40 hour library. There is no need for overkill (like player a 78rpm record on a super Bose audio system).

In the export tab on FCP there are several choices. I am leaning to using the DVPRO50 setting. I assume it is a larger file and higher quality than DVNTSC, but not the size of 8 and 10 bit uncompressed which I am assuming will eat up a lot of server space and take forever to download. This would be for the master clips. I will do an MPEG4 clip for the thumbnail viewing clips on the web with a watermark. I will also have to do a DVPRO50PAL clip as as well as DVPRO50NTSC clip - good idea? bad idea?

The bigger question I am having trouble getting a clear answer on is the cross platform issue.

I am obviously working in FCP. When I export these to my eternal hard drive which I am going to ship off to the website designer they are FinalCutPro quicktime.mov files.

Will these files transfer over to a PC based website and server?

I have tried a primitive experiment by burning a FCPquicktime.mov file onto a DVD. When I insert the DVD in my PC it will not play in my PC quicktime player. Is this just a simple goof on my part - or are there major problems in transfering FCPquicktime files for use on a PC?

I have checked out the other sites (much of my stock footage material is already available on exisiting sites - I am sort of going into competition with myself though I get to keep all of the revenue on my own site) The other sites have a variety of Codecs. Most offer 2 or 3 levels of download resolution at different prices.

My website designer will handle the different download resolutions capablities of the site, I am just trying to make the master clips that he can load and take from there.

As always, your answers, comments and help are greatly appreciated.

Doug Jones aka Skye24F

[www.apple.com]

Gotta be careful with DV50. It isn't on the list, which means it's an FCP codec, also, that means that PC guys may have problems opening it.

It's interesting that companies are starting to use ProRes. I suppose that is because Apple made the decoder available for Windows and Mac Users with Quicktime. Much better than transferring to an RGB codec (P-Jpeg/Png/Animation for cross platform compatibility).

Previously, to work with the Uncompressed codec you need to download the AJA and Blackmagic codecs to work with the Apple Uncompressed codec. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

If you your source as telecined to DVCAM, the DV25 codec is what you use, and if you did not treat the footage (eg. color correct, etc..), your footage doesn't get any better than DV25. So yes, you should have telecined the footage to a higher quality format.

Okay. PAL and NTSC. PAL is generally preferred to NTSC, as it has more vertical resolution (576 vs 480). Standards Conversion even on expensive hardware converters isn't going to bring the quality back, as vertical resolution is lost already.

On the other hand, regarding standards conversion to PAL, if your footage is telecined to 29.97 (with an added pulldown because it originates from film), you should remove the pulldown to bring it down to 24fps, then conform it to 25fps, then resize the footage in Compressor (turn on frame controls, and switch settings to "best". This ensures that the new frames created are not interpolated or frame blended frames.

>Is this just a simple goof on my part - or are there major problems in transfering FCPquicktime
>files for use on a PC?

Read point 1. That's probably the number 1 reason why P-Jpeg is used so often.



www.strypesinpost.com

Again, thanks for all the help and advice. I am slowly getting agrip on this.

Regards,

Doug Jones