Pressure cooker! Help me?

[gwyn]

I finished my VVC Premieres vid finally today. I think it looks awful but what can you do. I've never worked this far up against the deadline, which is Friday night, and I always like to give myself lots of room. That was not in the cards this year, between the job changes and getting a new computer and needing to get Final Cut Pro in order to vid and then another hard drive getting killed so I couldn't just use the old computer and FC Express. Gah.

At least Jack and Ianto are pretty and that makes it somewhat easier to deal with. Jack is so, so pretty. OTOH, I really envy Gwen's actress, getting to play all that hot UST with him. Yum.

Anyhow. I am once again in the position of begging my flist for help. Would anyone out there have some time to help me figure out how to export the file and demux it? I have never been able to get the demuxing thing to work before, due to compatibility issues, but supposedly with Pro I can. However, the manual is oriented toward the professional editor, and doesn't really provide the info I need in a way I can understand this and how it relates to what I need to do for VVC. And there are not only beeellions more choices about encoding than my old FCE 2.3 had, the interfaces are quite different (bigendian and littleendian whatnow?), and I am utterly lost and starting to get that sinking frustrated feeling where I'm going to cry because I am so hopelessly stupid. I'm using FCP HD, and which I guess is FCP 6? I understood it that I was meant to save the video file as MPEG 2, but I don't even see that as an option.

God, why did you make me want to be a vidder and yet make me so technologically inept?

If you can help me, I could meet you in chat or call you, if you might have time, and then I would offer you my first-born child in appreciation. Not that that's much of an offer, I realize. I also will buy you lots of drinks at the con if you're going.

Comments

[trelkez.livejournal.com]

I can't help (what with being a backwoods PC vidder and all), but I'm here to say \o/! You finished it! I'm thrilled to hear that. :)

[destina.livejournal.com]

OMG, I feel your pain. I so wish I could help with the technical stuff. *hug* But I'm thrilled you finished a premieres vid!!

[soundingsea.livejournal.com]

I am really, really dumb with FCP. But for what it's worth, I "save project", and then I do File->export->Quicktime Movie. There's some menus with some choices (mostly to do with encoding - I've been using H.264 for less loss.) Anyhow, when it's done, it comes out as a .mov file.

Is that what you're trying to do?

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Well, a little more than save as a .mov file. I'm trying to deal with some compression requirements and to separate the audio and video files, and I can't really figure out how based on the info I find. Some of it's just older, for a previous version of FCP, and a lot of it is made for a different kind of audience than what I'm doing it for.

::Hates technology.::

[soundingsea.livejournal.com]

You're way ahead of me! (The video work I do has far less in the way of requirements, and I've never had to separate the audio and video.)

One place I've found decent tutorials is AMV sites. They usually aren't Anime-specific.

[deejay.livejournal.com]

I think it looks awful but what can you do.

Honey, it can't possibly look worse than my camera-copy-source 'Iron Man' vid, lol...!

As for "demuxing" ... I will have four vids at VVC this year, and have no earthly idea as to what this entails.

*sigh*

[keiko-kirin.livejournal.com]

Does your Final Cut come with Compressor? The version I have came with Compressor.app, and in Compressor you can output a demuxed file, though it's not obvious that's what you're doing. Export > Using Compressor > opens up Compressor.app. Then you highlight or drag the file you want to demux into the "batch" pane, click the tiny pop-up for options, and look for the "DVD: Best Quality" choices that fit the VVC specs. Looks like the "DVD: Best Quality: 90 minutes" would work. It produces an AIFF sound file and an MPEG-2 video file. Though Compressor doesn't state it clearly, the MPEG-2 file is an .m2v, which is what VVC wants.

If your FCP doesn't come with Compressor, check the export options Final Cut has for something similar: "DVD: Best Quality." Those are *probably* going to be the settings for de-muxing, but, yeesh, Apple doesn't really tell you that.

I've heard that ffmpegX can demux, but in my (older) version of it, it'll only demux an .mpg or .vob file, neither of which Final Cut exports as, so I've never used it. MPEG Streamclip also has a Demux to .m2v +.aiff option, but this is the .app that has never worked for me! My version is a bit old by now, and fwiw, when I put a .mov file in it, all the demux options are greyed out. But I toss this out as something you can ask more experienced Mac vidders about if you get absolutely stuck.

[elynross.livejournal.com]

You've probably already looked at this, and I don't know how compatible it is with FCPro, but we have links to Killa's instructions (http://seacouver.slashcity.net/mac_mpeg2.html) and Barkley's modified instructions (http://www.bonuspoints.net/misc/Mpeg2EncodingwithiDVD.txt) in case you can't get FFMpegX to work.

Congrats on getting the vid done!