how to compress file from fcp3.

[mastermind]

I'm trying to export a 2 minute file from my timeline to a quicktime file so that i can e-mail it to someone. i tried the sorensen coded but with my settings the image is destroyed and is is still a 13mb file and i was told i should bring it to just a couple megabytes...can someone tell me how to do this and what settings are needed?

Thanks.

[Jenga]

A lot of tweaking and testing. Sometimes a minor change in the compression settings will suddenly make two worlds of difference. I had found that by leaving the quality settings below high but above medium, plus key-framing every 4 or 6 frames seemed to help but then recently I tried those settings again and they didn't seem to help a whole lot. So just play around with quality levels AND frame sizes, I forgot about those. For a larger file bumping it down to 480 x 360 provides some space savings and still looks big while 320x240 is about as small as I'll go but with that, a found balance between quality levels AND minimal key-framing (the higher number the more minimal the compression not the other way around) the more you can squeeze into less space. I just started using compressor with FCP 4 and it works great too after you get past the incredibly confusing initial interface. Either way you don't have FCP 3 so try playing with the sorenson 3 codec some more. PhotoJpeg works well too but I wasn't getting such small file sizes with the tiny bit of playing around that I did. Either way your movie better be reeeeally short if you're trying to compress it down to 2mb for an email attachment. It probably won't ever work for something over a couple of minutes long. That's just too much compression. Hope this helps!

-J

[Jenga]

Er... I meant you don't have FCP 4 so you don't have compressor. Anyway good luck

[mastermind]

thanks for the help. i'll try to tweak the settings more and see what i get.