First post, and its a cry for help...and I'm hoping it's a simple and 'obvious' answer... Basically, I've been happily using FCP7, and exporting my movies from it, which cheerfully play on my Mac(and with conversion in Mpegstreamclip, are happy to play back on PS3)....but no matter what format I convert them/export them as, I can't seem to get them to play back on PC. If any one can shed some light on what I need to do, I would be very grateful.
Hi Mark, I'd like to know if you tried these settings and how they worked out for you. I always deliver to my clients through YouTube or Vimeo, but my current client has just requested the addition of source files for both Mac & PC. Thanks!
I've used Flip4Mac HD Studio for quite a few years now, either just exporting a quick movie out of QT player (so you render your movie from FCP7 to something like ProRes422 or whatever your native timeline is - I go for 'Self Contained' too), then open that in QT7 player and export from there. However, for ultimate quality and the ability to batch (some of my jobs involve 4-20 movies at the same time), then I use Episdode - which then drives the same Telestream Flip4Mac plug-in, I think - to do a full-on 2-pass proper-down-scale for each one overnight. WMV is PC friendly, H.264 is not - not unless you convince them to use VLC player (not going to happen in most big corporations). Yes, you can hoof them up to Vimeo/YouTube, but then there can be security issues to worry about (I've had hidden pages turn up on Google searches, though I think that issue may be fixed now). So much easier to send them a 640x360 1.2 Mbit WMV (usually with BITC) for approval, then a 1280x720 WMV at 5 Mbit for PPT. Egad, I could rant on about this for ages, but basically 'modern' codecs like H.264 - usually as an MP4 variant - are getting better integrated within Windows 7 & 8, and this assumes that corporations are all up to date. But of course they're not. Some are blessed with IT departments that allow VLC, others are still using Windows XP and Office whateveritis. You can't tell until you get the phone call 'we cant see MP4s or MOVs'. There's a sort of H.264/MP4 lookalike called VC-1, but that's as widespread as Silverlight. So... sigh... we're still with bloody WMV for 'actual files sent to a client' if web viewing won't do (and I have clients whose IT departments ban browser access to YouTube, Vimeo, and a load of video sharing sites I've never heard of). Yours for between $49 and $179 - work out your pricings with clients so you can get the $179 version.
