Exporting 7d video for Web, Final Cut Express with Streamclip

Streamclip is fast becoming the Swiss army knife of video tools for video shooters working with the new Canon video DSLR’s (7D, 5D mk2, 1D mk4).  Especially those limited to using Final Cut Express as their editing tool.

Most newspapers cannot afford having Final Cut Pro on every workstation, let alone one, so FCE has been the affordable answer.  That was, until the HD video DSLR’s started coming out then editing became quite the process dealing with raw video that needed to be rendered.

I don’t want to get into my frustrations and of those I know dealing with the raw HD video.  Instead, I’m posting my Streamclip export setting and how-to videos below.  I hope this helps anyone with problems getting their video into Final Cut Express, or is dealing with the “size vs quality” setting for online video export.

These are by no means authoritative, but based on using the tools to get work done at my paper.  Anyone with comments, questions or suggestions please post it below, thanks!

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Getting 7D video into Final Cut Express

Anyone with Final Cut Express and the new Canon DSLR cameras know the frustration of getting their video ready to edit.  Here are my settings, that I have set up as “preset” in Streamclip to export it out for FCE use.

Streamclip, export to Final Cut Express from 7D

I  know the 1440 is not 1920 but is, by my guess is, that FCE was designed to play nice with the many 1400×1080 HDV tape camcorders on the market.  The menu says it’s a 4:3 aspect ratio but when you put the converted clip into FCE it adjusts the workspace to a widescreen format.  Also, I have not ran into a noticeable quality problem using the 1440 size.

Watch the How-to: (if you cannot read the menus click here to go to the youtube file and enlarge it to full screen)

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H264 mov export for Web use:

There are so many recommendations on saving for Web that it can be very, very confusing.  I found no distinct output that gave me a small enough size for the quality so I fiddled around, and around, and around until I hit on this.  For short or long videos (that would be uploaded to Blip.tv, youtube or vimeo) I used this set of settings in Streamclip.  I hope it works for some of you.

Streamclip settings for HD for Web

Watch the How-to:  (if you cannot read the menus in the video click here to play it in a new windown and hit full-screen)