export question

[Guest]

After shooting a short with double sound am now using Final cut pro for editing.In the project sequence I found out that much of my on board mic is useless at some points so therefore I relied on my DAT sound recording converted eventually to AIFF and placed to sync the images in the time line within the sequence 3rd and 4th tracks.My question is if I exported the image and the new sound into quicktime so they are both(my DAT data and video )locked in , is there a quality diminuation here, since no rendering was involved.The reason I want to do this is to discard completely the original unusable sound and for practical and clean editing.Thanks guys

[Jive]

Why don't you just toss the on-camera audio tracks from the timeline? Even if you consider it useless, just having it may be useful for something in the future.

Otherwise, there should be no drop in quality as far as audio goes.

[Staven]

You've got no problem. If you have the original on mic sound still maybe make an aiff file of it for record, then set up your timeline with only the good stuff. You may just want to create a new sequence(good copy) and move the video and the audio you want and leave a rough copy with the rough cut for reference if any sync issues arise. As said by jive no drop in audio quality.

[Guest]

what about video, is there a diminuationof quality, when I exported it it is now called finalcut clips not quicktime clips which was the original

[Jive]

As long as it's a .mov file, it will play just like any other quicktime file. The only difference is that it was created in FCP, hence the Final Cut file type. Also, just make sure you export as a self enclosed file or else the exported file will only reference the source files, not a completely new file of its own.

Also, I don't know the intricate details of the apple quicktime DV codec (or whatever DV codec you may using on your system), but most DV codecs do not reencode anything that has not been changed. Therefore, if you've applied no image adjustments to the video in the sequence, then the new file should contain a straight copy of the selected portions of the original DV stream. Quality will not be any different.

[jaredalv]

You may want to check your settings at export and make sure that you don't have any compression chosen. Then the quality would be diminished. Click the 'settings' drop-down from the export window and under 'compression' choose 'none'.

Also, if your plan is to export your sequence and then re-import it so that you have one audio-pair track now married to your video, make sure that you make movie self-contained. I screwed myself on this one time when I started out. What happened was that I then went and deleted my original footage since I now had a new video file, right?? WRONG!! Because my movie wasn't self-contained, I had deleted the reference video file it was linked to and then could only see red zebra on my video track in the timeline and nice blank,black screen in the viewer.

I was pretty ticked at myself for not recognizing the circular reference I had created.

Cheers,
Chico