After all my worrying, I finally buy Final Cut Express and to my virgin eyes the program looks just like Final Cut Pro — totally intimidating! To get beyond this I force myself to avoid all the possibilities and think about the most basic task I want to accomplish. Answer: Upload video footage from my Canon G9 to YouTube.
This past weekend I grabbed my G9 and pretty quickly had this:
Clearly this sucks. Horrible compression from hell. Worse than “dumb” iMovie would help me produce. However, I have succeeded in getting the footage in and out of FCE and on YouTube fast, and that was the point.
For “Take II” (below) I referred to a FCE tutorial on Lynda.com, and found some help on how/where to compress for broadband, getting this:
Not bad at all, but I wanted to see if I could find better, “ideal” settings I could use.
I found clear, awesome instructions on best HD compression for YouTube in Final Cut Express/iMovie from BIGlittleBROTHER in his awesome YouTube tutorial. I wasn’t shooting HD, but I thought I’d give it a try, and got “Take III”:
OK. Clearly I’m all stretched out, but I think BIGlittleBROTHER was on to something. The compression seems to be looking better at the 360 setting than in “Take II”, and I think it even gets better when I watch it at the 720 “HD” setting, although I’m not really sure.
I make a guess at how to get the aspect ratio normal and end up with my fourth and final take. Take a look at “Take IV”:
Satisfied!
And that’s it! I’m satisfied. Actually, I’m not really satisfied. There is so much beautiful video on the YouTube and this looks like poop. And I confess that I’m still these results all neurotic like (Is “Take IV” really better than “Take II?”). But wait! I’ve got to remember that
A) I’m dealing with a file from a Canon G9, not a 5D Mark II
B) These settings will do for now!
I just wanted to figure out how to get files through FCE to YouTube so I can move onto editing. I will continue to learn about compression as I move forward.
The Settings
Except for the fps and size (that I set to match my camera), all these settings are stolen from the very helpful video by BIGlittleBROTHER.
Format: QuickTime Movie
Compression Type: MPEG-4 Video
fps: 15 (to match camera)
Quality: Best
Size: 1024×768 (to match native size)
Sound: AAC
Rate: 44.1
Quality: Better