Quickest way to export project to USB drive

First, Thank you so much for every thing so far, I've learned from the website more then anywhere else, heaps of information and easy to understand. Again, thank you.

What will be the quickest way with keeping the quality to export a Final Cut ProRes project (from a AVCHD camera) to a USB stick in a formal that will play on most TVs today? QT (.mov) which will be the quickest to export from FCP doesn't play on TVs with USB port unfortunately.

I work in the tourism industry and we making videos of our customers doing there activity. we making 10min video every 30min and we need to give it to the customer as soon as possible. At the moment we exporting the edited project to a Philips DVD recorder via firewire to a DV camera, and from the camera to the DVD recorder, we losing a bit of quality but it's a lot faster then converting and burning the DVD on the computer. As the customer watching the video we recording at the same time so he can have a copy 2min after the video finish.

we want to move to USB sticks as that what every one wants now, but we can't slow the process down.

Any suggestion please let me know

Cheers
Elad

Theres a lot in there but.....

The fastest way to deliver a project to a client is over the web. Smartphone read it and computers read it as a url link and both devices will play h264 fine. Download time will very but at ten minutes you are looking at 2mins plus depending on the encode.

Start a youtube page and up load there thats will ensure smooth play on any device with a web connect.

on a stick they have to go find a device to play it. and often to play smoothly it must be transferred to the cpu.

If they are wanting this as a master then you just connect the stick and copy it to the drive (on a mac). this works for all connected drives and its often faster than the process you used there.

i would include both h264 and a high bitrate flv on to a 4-8gig stick.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Thank you very much for the reply.

What will be the settings for fastest but still keeping good quality for the H.264 and FLV for fast moving action?

What do you mean by "just connect the stick and copy..." copy the QT file?

Cheers
Elad

H264 is a good delivery option to think about as it is progressing but has not quite reached what passes for ubiquity in this sector.
Speeding up your compression stage is where you need to focus.

J Corbett has a point with web delivery but I can see how the value of a customer take-away is worth maintaining, not to mention that your clients may not be returning to web savvy environments, so don't throw that DVD recorder away either.

Depending on your budget, look at adding a compressor station that takes the completed files from FCP that are generated using the fastest method available, which I think you've already found is just a straight QT output at sequence resolution.
Pass that to the compressor station and at that point you can spend a lot of money and get a multi core system Mac Pro and set up a quickcluster and compression droplets or even folder actions that start a job as soon as the editor drops the completed file in to the folder. Even if you just have another computer (iMac/Mini/Laptop) having two stations will speed up your workflow.

A cheaper solution would be to look at one of the H264 render acceleration products.
Matrox has chips built into some of their MXO i/o cards that accelerate H264 renders. The ones with the Max chip do this.
Elgato makes the TurboH264HD, a USB based hardware encoder that speeds up renders. This is good because it can be moved around with relative ease.

My question for you is: have you sourced bulk USB sticks yet and if so, what size are you getting and how much are you getting them for?

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

A point I will note for USB sticks.
If the QT is over 4G, it will not fit on a FAT32 formatted stick.
And if it is over 4G, it will have to go on a Mac formatted stick; which
will make PC playback impossible (or very tough)

Just a thought




eladberger Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thank you very much for the reply.
>
> What will be the settings for fastest but still
> keeping good quality for the H.264 and FLV for
> fast moving action?
>
> What do you mean by "just connect the stick and
> copy..." copy the QT file?
>
> Cheers
> Elad

Thanks Andrew,
We have 5 iMacs in the editing station already, one of them is a 3 weeks old iMac which is very fast. so one computer is playing and recording into the DVD and the other is exporting to QT and into the USB drive. We would like to give our customers a H.264 version as well so they can upload themselves to the internet but a 10min video takes too long to convert (over 10 min for a 10 min video) is there settings or a way that you would recommend to do it quicker? is Elgato HD or Matrox will make a big deferent?
I'm in the process to finding a bulk supplier for the USB drive. we after 8GB ones, Please let me know if you know of one.

Thanks Mark
Our QT movie files are not bigger then 4GB, they about 1.5GB but there are 4 of them, so we planning to put 6 GB on a 8GB drives but it does need to work on PC and Mac. would that work or the max capacity for FAT format is 4 GB?

Thanks all
Elad

As long as each movie is less than 4 G in size, you are OK.
It's just that FAT 32 is readable by both Mac and PC;
but the 4G limit per file can not be broached.

You can still have 3 or 4 1.5G files on a FAT 32 drive.

When USB3 becomes the standard (and hopefully Mac will adapt it as well)
The throughput on USB will go way up.







eladberger Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Thanks Andrew,
> We have 5 iMacs in the editing station already,
> one of them is a 3 weeks old iMac which is very
> fast. so one computer is playing and recording
> into the DVD and the other is exporting to QT and
> into the USB drive. We would like to give our
> customers a H.264 version as well so they can
> upload themselves to the internet but a 10min
> video takes too long to convert (over 10 min for a
> 10 min video) is there settings or a way that you
> would recommend to do it quicker? is Elgato HD or
> Matrox will make a big deferent?
> I'm in the process to finding a bulk supplier for
> the USB drive. we after 8GB ones, Please let me
> know if you know of one.
>
> Thanks Mark
> Our QT movie files are not bigger then 4GB, they
> about 1.5GB but there are 4 of them, so we
> planning to put 6 GB on a 8GB drives but it does
> need to work on PC and Mac. would that work or the
> max capacity for FAT format is 4 GB?
>
> Thanks all
> Elad

If we want to give our customers a version that they would upload to the internet (YouTube or FaceBook or any other) what would be the format and the settings that will be the quickest but still reasonable quality that we'll covert it to?

Thanks
Elad

H.264. There are numerous settings for this in Compressor. YouTube uses H.264.
Also Vimeo has a guideline for uploading videos to their site that has a good tradeoff of file size and quality.
The aforementioned Elgato H264Turbo stick does this well.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!