Please help - File exporting way to large

Hi Guys!

I really would appreciate any help, bare in mind I usually shoot photos and have only started editing and have only picked up some tips and info from friends.

I have basically shot some surf clips from a 5dmiii, I shot these at 60p 1280x720.

unluckily I only imported the clips to my computer and batched them into FCP, I know I should have used mpeg streamclip but now as I have edited this clip, I am wondering if I should go back and do it all again or is there a way to minimize the size of the file.

The clip runs for 2minutes and 22 seconds and is currently exporting around 3.6GB, then through compression and using h.264 is bringing it down to about 3.2gb.

The way I am exporting is through Quick time conversion, I change the size to 720hd, as I want to upload it online (vimeo) and keep this quality.

The clip when played through fcp seems ok, not jittery or anything, however onced exported and also compressed too, it seems to be jittery, even when i minimize the screen, it still seems to freeze then run again then freeze.

If anyone could give me some basic pointers or help regarding this, would be appreciated.

My friend made a clip using a profession panasonic camera, his clips were .mov file and were all large files, when he exported and done the exact same process & settings as myself, his ended up being around 400+MB which was alottt smaller than my clip.

Thank you! for any one that can help.

1st, are you making "Optimized" files when you import? If so, this is making ProRes files which are "normal" sized files, as opposed to the super highly compressed H.264 your 5D is recroding. But you can NOT optimize, editing the H.264 files natively and keep the small file size.

Next, when you export, export as Master File, and use H.264.

There is no need for MpegStreamclip in your workflow, if you do it correctly in FCPX. I don't understand why at the end you use "Quicktime conversion" (what does that mean?) to change what is already 720 to 720 again. That seems like a useless step to me, so I guess I need to know exactly what that is all about.

As for prepping them for the web, check this out.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your reply.

I am using Final Cut 7, when I imported, i just directly imported them so they would h.264,

I am not familiar with optimizing the file to prores before to edit, Would this ideally make each single file bigger but more ideal to edit with?

Basically now i have edited a clip without optimizing and I have edited them with the original file from my canon 5d, so would I now have to re do the clip?

I am just unsure why it is exporting so large?, I only used compressor to see if it would bring the file size smaller.