Converting a QuickTime .mov to .flv

I wrote this up after some of my students had problems uploading H.264 encoded video from Final Cut Express to VuVox. Their videos either didn’t play back smoothly, or resized incorrectly–it seems VuVox only supports square pixels. So I tried converting the videos to .flv using Adobe Media Encoder, and it fixed all the problems we were having.

First, export the videos using the File>Export>QuickTime Movie command. Create a folder on the desktop called “flv_convert” (or something like that), and export there. Make sure you check the box that says “Make Movie Self-Contained.”

Once that’s done, you can quit Final Cut.

Launch Adobe Media Encoder.


Click the Add button on the right side of the Adobe Media Encoder window.

Navigate to your flv_convert folder, select the .mov files, and click Open. The clips should show up in the queue.

Select the first clip and click Settings, this should bring up the export settings menu.

Use the following settings:

Format
Format: FLV

Video
Resize to 512×288**
Frame rate: select the frame rate to match your footage
Bitrate encoding: VBR
Encoding passes: Two
Bitrate: 900 kbps***
Set keyframe distance: 15 frames (More frequent keyframes give you higher quality, but with increased file size)
Quality: Best

Audio
Defaults should be fine

**NOTE: This is a good size for VuVox, but may not be the best size for other uses. More info about resizing video for flash here.
***NOTE: Larger sizes require higher bit rates, 900 kbps is plenty for this size, but is way too low for HD.

Click the floppy disk icon next to the preset name, this will allow you to save the preset.

Name the preset, and click OK.

Click OK again, and it should bring you back to the main window. Click the drop downs in the preset column, and change your other clips to the VuVox setting.

Once you set all of your clips, click “Start Queue” on the right side of the screen. You should get a yellow progress bar along the bottom, and when it’s finished you’ll have shiny new .flv files in the flv_convert folder ready to upload.

You can also set a custom destination if you want the converted files to go somewhere else. You can also upload directly to an FTP server.

Converting a QuickTime .mov to .flv by Jamie De Pould is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 at 10:50 pm. It is filed under final cut, multimedia and tagged with compression, conversion, flash, flv, mov, quicktime, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.