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Editing Letterboxed Footage
I am importing footage into FCP 5 that was shot with a Panasonic AV-DVX100B with the letterboxing turned on. (Black bars are added, footage is not distorted or stretched.) The problem I’m running into is how to setup my sequence size to get rid of the black bars. I currently have it set to 720×405 but there are still a small amount of black on the top and bottom. It’s as though the size of the live area of film doesn’t match the 16:9 proportions.
Even worse, is there is a small strip of transparent background that will not go away on the bottom of the sequence. What is the best way to work with letterboxed footage in FCP? My goal is to keep it at 16:9 without the black bars.
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2 Replies
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I haven’t shot with the DVX, so I may be off, but I believe that was a choice that need to be made in shooting. You are stuck with footage that is shot with a widescreen look, but the actual image is 4×3. so to get the 16×9 footage, you would have to stretch the image (around 40%) to fill a 16×9 frame. Otherwise you’ll need to keep the black bars.
Good Luck,
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
Thanks for the response, Todd. Let me try and clarify a bit on what’s happening…
If I set the sequence size to a 16:9 proportion, and then scale the image to fill the screen and get rid of the black bars, I’m having excess live image bleed off the left and right edge of the frames. It seems as though the 16:9 proportions of the camera’s letterboxing isn’t accurate.
The other problem I’m having is if I use a custom sequence size like 720×405, I’m left with a small strip at the bottom of the canvas that will not let video go over top of it. No matter where I position the image, there’s always this checkerboard showing through:
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