Exporting Videos With Final Cut Express
Posted in Final Cut Express, How-to, Video on February 11th, 2010 by Tony Passera – Be the first to commentNew to Final Cut Express
I’ve been teaching Photoshop to photography students for about 12 years. When a recent student asked for training videos to supplement the instruction, I decided it was time to make some. Not knowing what I was getting myself into, I went out and got a copy of Final Cut Express 4.0. And so the fun begins.
Final Cut Blurries
After reading a few sections of the manual that comes with FCE, I was able to assemble a few mp4 video clips into a sequence. However, when I tried to export the sequence to get a final video result (also an mp4), I hit a roadblock. The resulting video was quite blurry and in a dynamic way. That is, text in the video would sometimes be crisp and sometimes become a blur. It was as if someone was pouring water over freshly painted watercolor. The blurriness would flow around the image. I assumed that this was some kind of compression artifact, so I tried using different parameter settings during the export to fix the problem. No luck. I finally concluded that there must be a bug in FCE’s processing of mp4 files. So, I tried a different output format. When I chose the Quicktime Movie format (an mov file), things started to work much better. With the right settings, I was able to get clean, crisp output. In this post, I’ll take you through the settings that I found to work, so you can get high quality exports without a fuss.