need to export low quality, lightweight files quickly

Hi,
What?s the best & quickest way to export low quality, lightweight video files? I need to put them onto a dvd.
Thanks!

If you've got FCP 7 installed, ProRes Proxy will produce very small, low quality files.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Thanks for the reply. I'm using FCP 6.06. Exporting to Quicktime movie is taking ages and leaves me with very large, heavy files. I don't know much about formats but I can't help thinking there must be a more weight/time economic way of exporting files. The quality is really not important, as they will be put onto a dvd for reference only. How does ProRes Proxy work? Can it be used with FCP 6.06? Thanks.

> I don't know much about formats but I can't help thinking there must be a more weight/time
> economic way of exporting files.

File conversion is always going to take time. What is your definition of "economical"? If you're impatient with, say, 10 minutes to convert 20 minutes of footage, then nothing will satisfy your standards.

MPEG Streamclip works faster than Final Cut Pro, Compressor or QuickTime Player for conversion. And make the frame size very small -- 640x360 for HD-source material, 320x240 for SD. But with MPEG Streamclip, unless you're talking about unedited raw footage, you're still going to have to export at least a reference movie file from FCP.

You want speed, forget DVDs. Get an external drive. Copies five to 10 times faster than burning a DVD, and holds a hundred times more data. Even a USB flash stick would work faster. DVDs as storage media are obsolete by several digital generations.


www.derekmok.com

Set Compressor to "never copy files", in the settings, do not allow job segmenting (unless you have very long clips), disable frame controls, and set up qmaster.

A light preview codec is mpeg 4. I use it for web based offline submissions.



www.strypesinpost.com

I've selected some footage & gathered it together as a sequence. It's 45 mins long. Even after rendering, fcp took about 4 hours to export as a quicktime movie and the file weighed 45gb. Is this normal? I noticed that the quicktime movie quality is pretty good, so I thought if I could bring the quality down, it might make the export time faster and the file size smaller. Any ideas? Thanks.

> It's 45 mins long. Even after rendering, fcp took about 4 hours to export as a quicktime
> movie and the file weighed 45gb.

What exactly is your timeline codec?
Four hours to export a movie file probably means you're using FCP to do the conversion. As I mentioned, FCP is not the fastest option.

If you export a reference QuickTime movie (full quality, not self-contained) and then used MPEG Streamclip to make a smaller version, I doubt it will take four hours.


www.derekmok.com