16:9 Footage as 4:3

[David Roth weiss]

[marksos] “The only way I can find to do it within FCP is to put it into a 4:3 sequence and manually scale up until the black bars are gone. Is this the best way of achieving this?”

Markos,

Do a test, I think you’ll find that FCP does a very nice job of scaling. Keep in mind, while the results will be slightly softer that the original, no one except you will have the original to compare it to side by side. You can throw a lot of money at the solution at an expensive online facility and you’ll probably get a small benefit on the order of 2%, but the difference will hardly be noticeable.

BTW, do take the time to split out all of your titles and animation and keep them uncompressed before placing them back into your newly reformated project.

DRW

[Alan Okey]

Could you clarify:

Does the 4:3 image need to contain the full content of the 16:9 source, resulting in a vertically stretched image?

Or does the 4:3 image need to maintain the correct proportions by scaling up the 16:9 frame and cropping the left and right sides of the image?

[Colin Mcquillan]

If you’ve exported a .mov, open it in quicktime, then choose file>export>size choose your dimensions (ntsc 4:3 if you like) then under that check off the “preserve aspect ratio using:” and select crop from the drop down.

I shoot/edit a weekly new release movie review. whenever a film’s EPK is late arriving, I grab the HD trailer from apple.com/trailers and use this method to convert the trailer from HD to SD DV-NTSC for editing. the result looks great! no stutter or frame jumps from frame rate conversion. like it came off the original beta EPK..

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC

[Andy Mees]

in addition to DRW’s advice, remember that if you take it to a facilities house to get it arc’d you will likely end up with a center cut or other one size fits all crop of the originla 16:9 … so if the center of focus in the composition of a specific clip is to the right or left of the frame, then that action might be completely lost.

Duplicate your timeline and change remove the anamorphic checkbox flag in the sequence settings of the duplicated …. now you’ll have a 4:3 sequence but every clip will be vertically stretched.
If your edit is relatively straightforward, then you may not have added any “basic motion” or “distortion” to any of the clips (?). If thats the case then double-click the first clip, to load it into the viewer window; switch to the motion tab, and change the Basic Motion > Scale property to 133, and the Distort > Aspect Ratio property to -33. That clip should now look like a center cut 4:3 version of the original 16:9 clip. Now copy that clip (CMD-C) then select all the other clips in the sequence and press OPT-V, thats “Paste Attributes” …. in the Paste Attributes dialog, deslect ALL checkboxes first, then add a checkmark to the Distort checkbox only, and press OK.
Now the whole edit should look like a center cut 4:3 version of the original 16:9 edit.

Thats the easy bit done. Now switch your canvas to View > Image + Wireframe mode, and move through your edit, clip by clip, reframing as necessary by clicking and dragging directly on the image in the Canvas window.
Note: for best results, some clips may need further scaling, or may need to have the framing keyframed throughout the clip.

[Marksos]

Thanks v much for your advice