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Activity Forums Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy HELP with aspect ratio please!

  • HELP with aspect ratio please!

    Posted by Pedro Miguez on March 11, 2007 at 8:30 pm

    Hi there,

    A few issues with aspect ratio:

    I’m editing some 4×3 footage right now, on my sequence which is set to NTSC 3:2 720×480. I would like to export a 4×3 clip for the director to view the work in progress, but so far when I export I’ve been getting a pillarboxed squeezed picture using the current settings on Quicktime Conversion.
    Also, I’ve been able to fix this by going into the motion tab and adjusting the aspect ration (which was set to 33.33) back to 0. This fixed the pillarboxing issue, but I’m unsure as to whether it is distorting the final product.
    Do I have to go to every clip in my timeline and adjust the aspect ratio back to 0? What should I do here?

    Also, a somewhat related issue is that I will later want to output a 1:1.85 final copy of the video. Given my set of circumstances, what should I do to make it so that it will play widescreen on a 4:3 TV and fullscreen on a 16:9 television? I do realize that a 1:1.85 ratio will still leave a bit of black bars on top and bottom, which is fine.
    So far, I’ve been applying the the 1.85 Widescreen matte, but I’m affraid that will make the picture and bars squeeze on an HDTV which I want to avoid.

    Please HELP me!

    Thank you so much.

    Steven Lambion replied 19 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • David Jakubovic

    March 11, 2007 at 11:13 pm

    I’ve had this problem. I found that in the sequence settings, the pixel aspect ration needs to be set to “square”. Once you’ve done that to a sequence you already edited – it will not change anything of what is already on it, but if you change the motion tab distortion back to 0 like you did, it was fine – and any new footage you cut into the correctly set sequence is also fine. This did not distort the final product that I worked on.

    David

  • Steven Lambion

    March 12, 2007 at 7:11 am

    It seems that when you add a clip to a sequence that has a different ratio(from pixel Aspect to frame size), Final Cut Pro tries to adjust the clip to fit inside the Canvas. It sometimes changes the Size and other times it changes the Aspect ratio of the clip.

    If you want to have the clip in the original Resolution reset size to 100 and aspect ratio to 0.

    -The number one problem is with Photoshop files!! it gets annoying.

    Video Specialist
    Apple Developer
    Owner of GranitWorks

  • Pedro Miguez

    March 14, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    Thanks for the help!

    I adjusted the aspect ratio back to 0 and that brought it back to 4:3. Next thing I’ll need is to make the final product into 1:1.85 aspect ratio. I wanna be able to make it so that it plays letterboxed on a regular TV, and full-screen on an HDTV.

    Any ideas on how to do this?
    Thanks again.

  • Steven Lambion

    March 15, 2007 at 2:05 am

    There are a few ways of doing this in Final Cut Pro. I haven’t done this to much, but here’s one idea:

    Make a New Sequence set up for the HD aspect you want. Then put the SD sequence inside that. right click it and then select open in viewer. Adjust the size so that all empty space is taken up.

    Idea 1:
    If it looks good like this then your done.

    Idea 2:
    if the edges of the SD sequence are cut off and you don’t like this, adjust the aspect ratio of the SD Sequence so it will fit in the HD sequence. Make sure that you don’t squeeze it to much are it won’t look right.

    You might need to use third party software to fix quality issues, otherwise use the anti-aliasing, and sharpen effect. Also using layering techniques might help.

    Conclusion: there might be a better way of doing this, but I haven’t done much with converting aspect ratios and resolutions.

    Hope this helps!!

    Video Specialist
    Apple Developer
    Owner of GranitWorks

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