Final Cut Studio: Encoders not seen in export options

This is a good find in the Apple Knowledge Base articles. Thanks to the guys at Digital Production Buzz for linking to this one. Just the other day I went to export a Quicktime for a client who I knew was working with an older version of Quicktime installed. When in doubt you can always count on the Sorensen codec to produce a decent image at a decent size that is quite compatible across the board of versions of Quicktime. When I went to choose my codec, Sorensen was gone! I went out to mpeg and all was well but I still wondered where Sorensen 3 went. Now I know. Add that to the other HUGE problems that Quicktime 7.4 is causing to the professional content creation community and it looks like Apple really screwed the pooch on this release. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it is a nice motto but it looks like we as content creators aren’t first in Apple’s mind these days. This is quite disturbing since Quicktime has long been the basis for tons of digital content creation. Seems like Apple is having a bit of trouble finding that space between making all of us creators happy and appeasing the big media companies with the media they so badly want to sell and Apple so badly wants to sell for them. If this is a sign of things to come with Quicktime as Apple moves more deeply into the market as a media provider then I really don’t look forward to updates in the future. Install them at your own risk.

UPDATE: Just thought I’d throw up a screen shot of where to find that option in Quicktime 7.4 to enable the legacy encoders like Sorenson. It’s in those System Preferences. Rememberl you really don’t need Quicktime 7.4 unless you have to get to iTunes 7.6 for stuff like movie rentals.