Export issues & other problems with lengthy FCP project...

R

Roy42

Active member
I've been editing a feature-length film for an independent filmmaker. We just finished a cut that's ready for some preview screenings, and now we need a DVD for this purpose.

The full running time is just under 2 hours long. Since Compressor has been buggy for me in the past, I decided to try exporting the whole thing as a Quicktime reference file (not self-contained) and then just dropping it into DVD Studio Pro, as I might for a shorter project... This isn't working, however. When the director tried it on his G5, it stopped after about an hour with a "General Error" message. Exporting on my G5 did the same, except it was an error message about video codecs (can't remember exactly).

We're both working off external LaCie firewire drives. I believe he tried exporting it to the project folder on his LaCie, whereas I attempted exporting it to my internal drive's desktop.

I am currently exporting it with Compressor from FCP, though at the moment it is still "processing" and shows no progress.

On a sidenote.... It seems that whenever we open the project, many render files go missing without any apparent reason. This is without switching scratch disks or moving to another computer or anything like that; simply closing & opening the FCP project seems to result in missing render files. It is normally not much of a problem, but given the project's length at this point it takes a considerably long time to render what's missing, and I want to make sure the timeline is fully rendered before exporting (though correct me if that's not necessary).

Any ideas on what's the best way to get this 2-hour project to a DVD? What methods/settings would you reccomend?

Thanks.

-DVG
 
Just out of curiousity what version of FCP are you using?

If you export out to compressor, you don't need to render. To my understanding, if you export from the timeline, using Compressor, it is exporting from the raw images, and ignores the render files (and thus hopefully provides a cleaner mpeg-2).

I think your problem with DVDSP is that you're trying to create it using a non-self contained file. Yes of course the hope is that it will then read back the original media and give you a better compression. But that's not really what DVDSP was meant for and so I think you're asking too much of it. If you're determined to use DVDSP to do the Compression I'd certainly use a self-contained movie for starters. That would be the absolute first thing (again if you're determined to use DVDSP for the compression).

However, if Compressor just isn't working for you, you might want to consider investing in BitVice. It is a third party software solution for compression. Forum users here who use it feel it provides Compressor level quality but does the job much faster. So it might be well worth your consideration and investment. Good luck.

cheers.
 
Forgetting...

A solution I've used sometimes is to split a long sequence in smaller chunks of 20 minutes, then convert to MPG2 and finally reassemble in DVDSP. This could be also useful if you want to put chapter markers in DVSP to jump from a scene/part to an other as in Hollywwod DVDs..
 
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