For the workshop we settled on Apple Intermediate as an editing codec. We were bringing in footage from a wide variety of cameras, mostly Canon and Nikon SLRs, but a handful of dedicated video cameras too. We wanted everyone to be on the same page.

For the Canon and AVCHD folks it was easy, we just set up the plugins for Apple Intermediate, then did a standard Log and Transfer. For the Nikon shooters, it was a little bit more complicated. There isn’t a Nikon plugin, so they had to use Compressor (or MPEG Streamclip) to transcode from Motion JPEG to Apple Intermediate.

So … why not ProRes 422?

The most obvious reason is storage. We had people using a wide variety of hard drives. Some were USB, some FireWire. Some were big, some were small. Apple Intermediate gave us good quality at reasonable file sizes. The main drive of the workshop was creating content for the web, which means it’s going to get compressed down quite a bit anyway. We weren’t going to be doing heavy color work, and we didn’t need alpha channels. So there you have it, Apple Intermediate. We could’ve very easily landed on ProRes LT (which has a similar data rate), but there were a handful of people using Final Cut Express, which uses Intermediate exclusively.

Like I said earlier, a lot of it comes down to storage and use. For HD video, ProRes 422 averages around 66GB per hour. The same footage encoded using Apple Intermediate comes in around 49GB per hour, and the quality is still excellent. When Apple released Final Cut 7, they also introduced several new ProRes flavors, including ProRes LT, which comes in at 46GB per hour. Intermediate and LT are also much nicer to laptops.

I haven’t done much experimenting with it, but I may start using LT for future projects. Apple designed the ProRes family with multicore Intel systems in mind, so you can go longer between renders, and footage renders faster. The advantage of LT over Apple Intermediate is the extra color information (4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0). The big caveat here is that Final Cut 6 can’t handle the new codecs, so you’re better off using Intermediate (or normal 422) if you’ve got to go back and forth.

For web use, ProRes 422 is generally overkill, especially if you’re not doing color work. If you need an alpha channel, however, then 422 it is.

If you’re mastering Blu-ray, then by all means, use 422, otherwise, save some drive space for your next project.

For more info about ProRes and other codecs, check out Larry Jordan’s site and Apple’s ProRes page.

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.