50+ Hour Movie, does Quicktime Pro have a movie limit length???

Question

Hi, I currently making a 50+ hour "art" film, and I've been told that since Final Cut Pro's sequences can only be 12 hours long, I would have to stich about 5 x 12 hour sequences together in Quicktime Pro. Does anyone know of Quicktime's limitation's?? Any advice would be great. Thanks.
Dan

Answer 1

Does anyone know of Quicktime's limitation's?
Would assume only you wll likely know for sure as I can't believe too many people would be creating contiguous clips of such duration. In any case, as a "temorary topic of interest," I conducted a basic experiment. Took a feww short cuts, however, to speed up the process. Used a two hour plus (1.5 GB) iPod compatible source file and "stitched" 16 segment duplications together. Total duration for the combined clip was 35 hours, 20 minutes, 18 seconds, and some odd frames and a final files size on the order of 24 GBs. Realize this isn't the 50 hours plus you specifically asked about, but figured it would make an adequate test for the purposes of this forum.
Would suppose it all depends on what you mean mean by limitations here. QT had no problem creating and playing the target file described above. In fact, I was very surprised that all 544 (16 x 34) chapters in the final file were functional. Took approximate 45 minutes or so to create the file. (Neglected to note exact timing) Since I assume a lot of disk caching was going on during the "set-up" and the actually writing phases of 24 plus GBs of data, this timing seems reasonable. Only real peculiarity noted was the accuracy of file/property info for the target file. While segments in the "source" file seemed to increase as expected as more and more segments were pasted together, these windows were found to be totally inaccurate in the opened target file. Total file (i.e., data) size displayed for the summary track was equal to the data size of the chapter track. Total audio track data size was depicted as zero bites while only the video track appeared to be accurate. Not sure if these inaccuracies represent bugs in QT player or a limitation in readout capabilities. In any case, the finder indicated a total file size of about 24 GBs which implies the audio track was actually about 2 GBs (which sounds about right here). While I assume there will be an upper limit to file sizes created in this manner, I would tend to worry more about disk caching and immediate HDD file storage space first.
Any advice would be great.
Not sure the workflow I employed (all at once stitching) would be the best in your case. Might be a better approach to "stitch" one file at a time in case your run into unanticipated problems. In addition, it would give you a chance to see if this process is a linear or geometric progression in terms of time and space requirements. Would appreciate you feedback here.