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16:9 aspect questions again
OK, I am still really confused.
I shoot everything with a Canon XL2 in 16:9 and my sequence is a combination of 16:9 DV footage with still photographs using a Ken Burns effect.
I capture the video and FCP recognizes it just fine as 16:9. However, my sequence is 4:3 and includes many still images which I then use a letterbox mask to make sure they are cropped to the same aspect ratio. Everything is just fine until I playback the final DVD on my widescreen TV, it’s stretched.
Does the sequence have to be 16:9, then the Compressor setting also 16:9 in order for the final output to be squeezed up so it looks correct on my widescreen monitor?
If I use the 16:9 setting on Compressor to make the DVD, it looks stretched and wrong.
The XL2 has a native 960×480 which I understand is then squeezed into the 720×480 format. It seems my final video is always 4:3 and then my TV scaling distorts it.
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8 Replies
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[paulmc] “If I use the 16:9 setting on Compressor to make the DVD, it looks stretched and wrong.”
If you want to ultimately end up with a full screen movie then you work in a 4:3 sequence within FCP just like you’ve been doing. I don’t understand why you’re applying a letterbox mask to your stills, though. Would that not make your stills even shorter than they need to be for a 4:3 picture? I would think that you’d need to crop the sides of your stills to make them fit rather than the tops and bottoms. Unless you really mean that you’re applying a pillarbox mask to hide the sides of the stills, and not a letterbox mask.
If your XL2 footage is 16:9 you’ll be cropping the sides when you drop them into the 4:3 sequence, which is okay as long as there’s nothing in the cropped areas you need to keep.
Export your timeline as a 4:3 QT movie and go through the entire Compressor and DVD authoring process with the 4:3 fullscreen preset. Your finished DVD should play fine on your widescreen TV as long as you’ve selected the 4:3 viewing aspect ration on your TV’s remote.
More info here:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/faking_it.html
– Don
“Please take a moment to fill out your profile, including your computer system and relevant software. Help us help you.”
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Thanks Don. To answer your question, the whole things a bit bizarre. What apparently happens is the following: take a 16:9 and put it into 4:3. At least the way I’ve been doing it, the whole thing shrinks to fit the 4:3 but keeps the aspect ratio perfect – thus I am guessing gives me a final output of 720×360 if that makes sense. That, of course, means that the top and bottom of the 4:3 image is cropped (relative to 480) and when I put in a still photo, it fits the 720 but wants to maintain the 480 so I needed a mask.
Looks like I went to a lot of trouble to make something apparently simple: difficult. Seems a common pattern for me. 🙁
Now, since all this is in a 1 hour video with hundreds of edits, I am hopeful I can just grab the whole sequence, place it in a new sequence with the proper aspect ration, lose the widescreen mask and life will be good?
Thanks for the help and advice.
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Try changing your sequence to DV anamorphic….
if your footage is 16:9 you will want to edit in
16:9… the stills should be OK.
Then use the DVD 16:9 preset…
of course you need to view on a 16:9 screen…
if you did everything right then your 16:9
program should play on a 4:3 screen with letterboxing…
some older DVD players will not playback 16:9 material however….. -
OK, for those of you interested, here’s the end of the story and the resolution to the problem. First, thanks for the help which led me to the right answer.
I went back to FCP and changed the sequence to anamorphic, as was suggested, expecting everything just to pop back the way it should on my 16:9 Sony PVM. Nothing changed and it was still squeezed as if it were still 4:3 trying to fit into the wrong space. I did some experimenting, and discovered if I took one of my raw clips from the browser, placed it in this new anamorphic sequence, it was perfect. Anything I copied over from a previous sequence in 4:3 or anything remaining in the sequence I just converted, remained squeezed, even though looking at the clip’s info I could see it was truly anamorphic.
To make a long story short, here’s the deal. I figured out that FCP automatically changes the aspect ratio of any clip you bring in, to fit the sequence format! Took me a while to figure that one out. In the motion tab, look at distort and that’s where the aspect ratio change took place. I was forced to go through every single section and turn off the distort and now it’s fine.
Whew! That was a lot of work for a dumb mistake. maybe someone else will make the same mistake and can learn from my follie.
Thanks for all the help!
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Paul,
Do yourself a favor and read this:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/understanding_16_9.html
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hey paulmc
this is an extremely common dumb mistake … in future, should you come across it again, you can save yourself alot of work by first selecting everything in the timeline, and then pressing cmd-opt-v to invoke “remove attributes” window. select “distort” and press return. caveat: this will reset all distort properties on all clips, so if theres any in there that you distorted on purpose, then you’ll have to go back and do those distortions again
cheers
Andy -
Wow. Thanks guys. I am a real newbie to all of this and it sure is helpful info! I could have saved a couple of hours last night had I known this! After I got rid of the disort on all the clips, it had to render the entire piece again so I left it to do its work. I trust that I haven’t lost any quality?
Thanks again. very helpful.
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OK, so now it’s all fixed and I find the next perplexing issue. Sorry guys.
I go to make a DVD of this (now) anamorphically correct film in DVD Studio Pro. To do this, I made a Quicktime movie out of the FCP timeline (instead of Compressor because I want to add chapters in DVD Studio pro) using the “keep settings” command. Looks perfect when I replay the Quicktime movie.
In DVD Studio Pro I select 16:9, MPEG2 compression, in the preferences, it looks perfect in the browser, I build my DVD. I play the finished DVD on a cheap DVD player in the studio that is connected to my Sony PVM set to 16:9 (which is what I use to view the FCP output). It’s wrong! It’s squeezed vertically as if it were already stretched to 16:9 and then being stretched again. If I change the PVM to 4:3 scaling, it’s right.
OK, I have heard that different programming teams built DVD Pro and FCP, so maybe their logic is different. I change the DVD pro compression settings to 4:3, build the DVD again and this time it’s perfect on the Sony PVM, set in 16:9.
Wait. It gets very strange. I take both DVD’s home to where I have a large screen TV and a higher end Sony DVD player just to be sure. Both DVD’s are perfectly scaled when viewed on the large DLP.
I am not going to have much hair left. This makes no sense unless, perhaps, there’s some sort of scaling going on inside the higher end DVD player that’s not going on inside the cheap DVD player?
Two questions:
a:) what’s going on?
b:) which should I choose for mass distribution?Paul
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