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”: Continue reading “Final Cut Express Newbie – Take One – Video Compression for YouTube”