Dear Folks:
I hope this is an appropriate question for this board. I posted on the Apple Support Discussion Board and I'm hopeful. I sure need help!
I am trying to create video podcasts using Final Cut Pro Studio 2. They consist of:
1 - AAC audio (a lecture)
2 - "Slides" containing text created in Illustrator
3 - Brief full motion video clips (QT) created using a screen capture program
My video clips are NOT from a DVD or a camera. They are not NTSC, they are not interlaced. They are Quicktime files created by a screen-capture app right off my desktop. These captured movie files can be exported via Quicktime at any Quicktime setting.*
The Illustrator "slides" are text heavy -- like Powerpoint slides. This text needs to look as crisp and sharp as possible.
The resulting file will be embedded in a web page and progressively streamed at a maximum screen size of, let's say, 800 pixels across (from a file half that size**). I will also export for iPod/iPhone.
I tried a DV NTSC timeline but the text looked terrible. Then it occurred to me that I have no camera-captured broadcast-style video so I needn't use an interlaced format.
So, what sequence setting is right for a timeline with no real "video" in it? (I guess I mean video in the broadcast or DVD sense.) Is there a progressive editing codec that will work for me? As far as I know you can't edit MPEG4 or H.264 in Final Cut. How about ProRes? Is that a strictly digital editing format that might work? Motion JPEG?
Any help would be great.
I'll leave the FPC sequence settings to someone else, as I'm not an expert in that area. But here are some suggestions:
1) For your slides, you can save them in PDF format in Illustrator, can't you? Both Motion and FCP will import PDF files. I'm not sure how well/poorly they handle scaling up a PDF, but it's worth trying out.
2) For your screen captures, there are a couple of things to consider for the format that you store them in initially (for editing): a) As you pointed out, you don't need or want interlacing
b) You probably also don't want chroma subsampling
I know of only a few codecs that don't subsample the chroma channel - Animation, None, TGA, TIFF, and PNG. There may be others. It's been a while since I've looked into it. Using those codecs may reduce the number of functions which work in realtime in FCP, though. (And for the record, you can drop H.264 or MPEG4 footage into a timeline and edit it. You get the red bars, but it's not like you can't use it at all.) But if all you're doing is cutting together footage and not using effects or the motion tab, then I think if your sequence settings match your footage, you should be able to work with footage in those codecs. (At least, that's what my quick test with some Animation footage shows. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.)
Hope that helps, Darrin
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