Hello! I'm using FCP 7.0.3 for a few projects right now. I'm rusty on Final Cut Pro and when I finished my first movie I exported it as a .mov file and it ended up being almost 700mb. This piece was ONE MINUTE LONG. Even the .avi file, which didn't have the quality I'm looking for, was over 100mb.

I'm going to be doing a few 1-5 minute pieces. I want them to be HD but really they're just going online so I need them to look decent on youtube and smartphones and stuff. What kind of settings should I use when I export these? There are so many!

I tried googling this but oddly I wasn't able to find what I was looking for, and there's so much stuff to sort through.

If you are uploading to YouTube, I would export from Final Cut Pro as a Master QuickTime file in the native resolution of your Timeline, which I am assuming is an HD flavor of some sort. Then drop that file into Compressor and drag the Apple TV preset setting to it which will render you Master QuickTime file into a 1280x720 .mv4 file. An .mv4 file is another way of saying it's an MP4 file, it's mostly to associate the file to iTunes. I would just change the extension from a .mv4 to an .mp4 in the Finder, then use that newly compressed .mp4 file to upload to YouTube.

If you want to go to full 1080p HD for your YouTube video, you'll have to go through the same process in Final Cut Pro, but you'll then want to make sure you use the right compressor settings, preferably an H264 codec with the frame dimensions of 1920x1080.

Did you get it figured out?