From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

Adjust export settings - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

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Adjust export settings

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at choosing some export settings. I've got my sequence ready to go. I'm going to go to File, Output, Export to File, I've got my Export your sequence title up here. I'm just going to call this Export 001 so we have a reference. And right now in the Export setting we've got Untitled selected. This is just a free, available Export Settings slot, if you like, and I'm going to click Options. The first thing to check in the Export Settings dialogue is this one, Export As. This allows us to choose the file that we're going to create from our timeline. There's quite a few options on here. QuickTime Movie on Mac OS is a good option. On Windows you'll have AVI. I'm just going to start with a QuickTime movie here 'cause it's a good general reference. By the way, a QuickTime Reference file doesn't actually contain any media. It's a kind of translator file that allows you to quickly export a version of your sequence just as metadata, almost like an edit decision list, and bring that into another application to work on it. And what happens is the other application will work with your original media via the QuickTime Reference file. Not all applications support the QuickTime Reference format, but if you decide to use Sorenson Squeeze, and a version of it is include with Media Composer, you'll use a variant of the QuickTime Reference to get the media over to Squeeze so that it can conduct the re-compression. But we're going to export straight out of Media Composer. We've got the option to use marks. I might as well turn that on, that's going to just give me my nine seconds and seven frames between my in and out marks. Here's that option to use selected tracks. Again, this will override the monitoring but not the Track Output Enable options. I don't need to worry about that because I've got my top track set for monitoring anyway. Include inactive audio tracks simply means those audio tracks that are not enabled will be included. And this is a pretty common gotcha, because while you're working on a mix, pretty common to enable and disable audio tracks and then forget that you didn't turn them on again. And Enable Mask Margins is an interesting feature. If I just cancel this dialogue, cancel out of here, go to Format, down at the bottom we've got Mask Margins and we can specify a mask that we want to apply to our content. You can enable viewing those masks in the Composer window, or not, in any case, if we go back to our Export dialogue, and into Options, turn these marks back on, you can enable to include the mask margins so that you get, for example, the letter boxing that you chose in your project format. And now we get onto the Export Settings themselves. Same as Source, we'll replicate the original media. So if your media files are DNxHD, then you'll have DNxHD output. You can also limit to using Avid codecs. If I choose Custom I get full access to the Format options for this particular file type. Just going to go in there and take a look at these. And if you've seen the QuickTime encoding options before, this will look very familiar. Under Settings you can specify the Compression Type, and there's quite a list of these. I'm not going to go into all of these settings, but I'm happy with H.264, this will make a QuickTime movie version of an MP4 file, which is fine, or MPEG-4. You've got the option to add some filters. I would probably not do this, because we're in Media Composer, of course, which is allowing us to do things like blur our shots anyway, so let's not do that. And we've got control of the size of the output. Compressor native just means make this the same resolution as our sequence. But we could override that if we want to. Down here under Sound we can specify the compressor used for the sound. Linear PCM is uncompressed, probably the two most popular alternatives would be AAC or Apple Lossless. Again, I'm just going to cancel out of here for now. And you probably don't need to prepare this for internet streaming. Fast Start is a relatively old technology that's used in particular for media that is kind of downloaded rather than streamed. When media is streamed it comes from a specific server dedicated to the purpose. But there still sometimes are cases where media intended for the web actually is just a download player, and when the player feels that it's got enough of the media to start playing, then off it goes, while the rest of the media downloads in the background. This is a little bit like the buffering you see on YouTube or Vimeo, but a little more basic. We don't really need this because we're just going to make a file that we're going to use as media, so I'll turn that off, doesn't make any difference. Click OK, next up we've got this pretty obvious option. Do we want to export video and audio, video only, or audio only? Now that we're in a custom setup here, I'm going to put in our full width and height, 1920 by 1080. Under Audio Format, I can specify my output channels. We're producing this in stereo so we're all good. And you can see that each of these settings makes sense as you work your way down the list. If I'm happy with these settings overall, I can choose Save As, let's call this QuickTime H-264, I'll click OK, and save. Let's go back to the name here and we'll call this Export 001, and save. Okay, and now I'm going to bring up my desktop and my Outputs folder and I'm going to Alt drag this into my bin, so we can take a look. And here is the little section I exported. If we look in our settings, and let's just scroll down here, there we go. QuickTime page 264, it's selected, and the next time we export, because it's selected, it'll be the default option so that's how you get into and modify the settings for Export, and of course save them as a preset to use another time.

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