What would you do when you are so desperate that you can do anything? Well, for me, it is buy an expensive software called Final Cut Studio and have it shipped overnight before doing a thorough research like making sure it would work with your hardware.

Anyway,  I installed the software (that takes 4~6 hours!)  and ran it on macbook. As soon as I tried to render some old projects, final cut pro quit with error message: “The problem may have been caused by the Pro Graphics Plug-in…”.  In fact, even if you don’t render the sequence, just drag your time line around, you will get the error.  I expanded the Ram from 1GB to 2GB. Same. I reinstalled the OS on a much larger hard drive, same! (More frustration came when I tried to uninstall the darn thing to release some hard drive space, none of the content files were deleted! I found the content folder for SoundTrack Pro but I still have 20 GB of phantom files!)  I searched online and then realized that Final Cut doesn’t support the integrated video card of macbook! However, there are people able to run the software on macbook.

Eventually, one post gave me a hint that Motion might crash on macbook. Well, I didn’t pay attention to it at first since Motion worked fine for me. I did notice that if I remove motion clips from the Final Cut project, the project seemed to stay stable. I also tested some simple text effect rendering and it was OK also. So instead of directly import Motion file into Final Cut Pro, I export the Motion animation to Mov first then import that into Final Cut Pro. It worked! So after 3 days straight frustration, I could actually stop pulling my hair out and do some work. Shu….

I haven’t done too much rendering but I have done a little more work on Motion, Final Cut and Compressor and everything works fine so far. Keep my fingers crossed.

I am still quite confused about the whole compression issue. Last video I used Quicktime Pro on a Windows machine and found that 220KBPS+H.264+MP4 produces a decent small file. But this time, it looks like crap. I got better result using Compressor MP4+ (no H.264, bummer!) + Medium VBR???? (Apple’s default setting for Web, which exports Mov file, produces larger files than MP4 format)  What caused the difference? Do I have to do a bunch of testing again next time?