A no win situation with MPEG-2

[liquidigital]

Guys, I have Final Cut Pro 4.0, and cannot upgrade without getting the higher operating system. I have a Powerbook G4, but the ram needs to be at 384 for Final Cut HD, so here's my dilemma. I cannot effectively use Compressor and I'd like to be able to author a 24P DVD with MPEG-2 compression. On my Powerbook, it says "cannot connect to batch" something or other. On the support website, it says to download the update. Well the update makes Compressor not work with FCP4. You need 4.1 or higher to make it work. Again, the requirements are higher RAM. My export settings for Quicktime do not have it in FCP, but in Quicktime Pro I can export as MPEG-2. So what's the workflow here? Should I export from FCP4 with no compression (or uncompressed) as a quicktime movie at 23.98 and then export in Quicktime Pro as an MPEG-2? I hope you guys are following me, I'd like to not have to spend anymore money. Thanks for any help, Mike

 

[Scottdvx100]

Re: A no win situation with MPEG-2

Do a test on a short section. Uncompressed is going to take up a lot of disk space. Try animation if you need uncompressed since at least the simpler scenes will be smaller. If you haven't done any real image manipulation then you can save to DV format without losing quality.

Is this going to be burned with iDVD or with DVD Studio? I don't think iDVD can take MPEG-2 files directly.

I know you don't want to spend money but you can get another 512MB for $100

 

[liquidigital]

Re: A no win situation with MPEG-2

Thanks for the reply. I have a Lacie external hard drive hooked up. 250 gigs. So I'm not worried about the disk space. I tried exporting an uncompresed last night and it didn't play back very well on my laptop. This will be going to DVDStudio Pro, hopefully as a 24 progressive mpeg.

 

[Scottdvx100]

Re: A no win situation with MPEG-2

Uncompressed won't playback as well since it's much larger in size and disk can't spool it off fast enough. Should be fine though for the conversion.