Quicktime Reference: File too big, export too long

[thomstitt]

Just had to run this by you guys, I'm a bit confused here. I've got an hour-long video to export. I don't need a full self-contained movie, as I'm immediately going to be running it through compressor. The final H264 will be used, the Quicktime reference will then be deleted.

So I go to export a Quicktime Movie, I UNCHECK "make movie self-contained", and off I go with default settings, no compression.
It looks to take at least as long as exporting a fully self-contained movie. Granted, there are 4 video tracks and 4 audio tracks.

Other QT Reference movies I've made of similar length have exceeded 100MB in size. This just seems absurd to me. I mean it's still a fraction of what the full self-contained movie would be (at least 8GB), but I thought QT Reference movies were almost like XMLs, and should be tiny in size. I seem to recall Avid's QT Reference export giving me more of what I'm talking about.

Am I doing something wrong? Does Final Cut do Reference movies differently?
Or is this fine, and I'll just have to live with it? The main problem is the export time, I can live with 100MB QT Reference movies, but i'd rather not, as disk space will fill up quite fast this way.

 

[thomstitt]

I forgot to mention, not all of my QT References, as I discussed earlier, will be deleted right after compression. some I'm creating simply to use multiclip editing (can't merge video clips together into one long clip in FCP, so I have to lay them in a timeline and then export). I have a LOT of angles to deal with on several productions, so this is going to take up a heap of hard drive space I'd rather avoid.

 

[David Saraceno]

Did you happen to fully render the video of the sequence and mix down the audio as well before doing the reference movie?

And then saving the project before the reference movie was exported?

 

[bigbossbmb]

yeah, a QT ref movie will reference the render files of the project. if things aren't rendered, then it renders them for you and saves it in the file.

 

[thomstitt]

Well, in the case of the current video I'm exporting, there are no effects or transitions to be rendered, and there is no audio at all, I'm only exporting video. It's a 28-minute sequence with 3 shots in it, one after the other.

The export estimates over 30 minutes. That seems completely crazy to me. It doesn't take that long to export a self-contained movie over an hour long on this machine, and that's full of effects, audio, and transitions, 3 to 4 tracks of video, text... Why is this very basic sequence taking so long to put out to a reference?

Maybe I have my sequence settings wrong and it's changing a bunch of crap on the video I'd rather it not? whatever the case, this workflow as it is now is not going to work for me, as I have way, way too much footage to process if it's going to take this long.

Here's my issue, in case someone has a better solution: I'm doing multi-cam editing of live events, synced with slates, some have audio, some don't (the current one doesn't). When capturing the footage, Final Cut broke the footage into small pieces, I'm assuming because my drive is Fat32 (we have to move it between a Mac and PC). So we've got a bunch of 1GB files and smaller, each camera angle broken into more than half a dozen different movie clips on the capture scratch disk.

So now I need to do a multiclip edit of the event using the 3-4 different camera angles... but as I mentioned, each angle is split into a number of different clips, and there's only one slate at the beginning.

Right now I'm assembling the footage for each angle into its own sequence and then exporting a QT Reference, hoping it would be fast and the least bit of stress on the hard drive. But that's not working out so far. Any ideas?

 

[thomstitt]

Whoooaa... What the hell am I doing wrong? I am absolutely positive I have "make movie self-contained" UNCHECKED. That is, there is not a checkmark in that box, meaning I'm only putting out a reference movie...

So why is my 28-minute sequence reference movie nearly 7 GB???


EDIT: i think I figured it out. As I guessed earlier, my sequence settings did not match my footage. It's weird, usually Final Cut asks me when I load footage into a timeline "sequence does not match clip, change sequence settings?", to which I reply, "yes please."
But not this time.
I think Final Cut's getting passive aggressive because I haven't used it in a while.

EDIT 2: Yep, I fixed the settings, and when I went to export the reference, it hung at 0% and informed me that it would take "7 hours." Nope, "8 hours." A few seconds later the 8 hours turned to "less than a minute", and it flew right through.