Anamorphic to Letterbox in FCP

[Martin Baker]

It’s easier than you think James 😉

1. Create a new, non-anamorphic sequence
2. Drag your final 16:9 sequence from the browser into the 4:3 sequence and it will automatically be letterboxed.
3. Export.

BTW where are you seeing the shimmering? (i.e. field problems) On a video monitor or on the canvas?

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each
Multicam Lite – The first multicam solution for FCP

[D James]

Hi Martin

Thanks for your reply. The steps you listed were actually the first thing we tried, with the exception that I imported a quick time of the anamorphic export and not the sequence itself. (I just re-tried your technique of dragging an anamorphic sequence into a non-anamorphic one and it doesn’t resize it)

The shimmering we’re getting is apparent on both the canvas screen and the NTSC monitor. It’s at its worst when the camera tilts up and down.

Any other suggestions are most welcome. Cheers,

James.

[Charles Simonson]

James, you don’t want to add letterboxes to your content. What you want to do is take your anamorphic 16:9 sequence and make a QT movie with it, with the anamorphic flags still present. Then, encode your movie to a 16:9 MPEG-2 at 720×480. This retains all of the original resolution of your source, and the only shimmering you will see may be because of a poor-quality encoder. Once you have a 16:9 MPEG-2, you can then drop it into your DVD suite, tell the app that it is a 16:9 asset, and adjust your display settings for playback. For instance, for a 16:9 track, there are three display settings in DVD SP: 16:9 Letterboxed, 16:9 Pan-and-scan, and 4:3. Selecting 16:9 Letterboxed, automatically generates the letterboxing by the DVD player and displays your 16:9 footage in widescreen on a 4:3 TV. Better yet, if you play back the 16:9 MPEG-2 on a 16:9 display, then there will be no need for letterboxes to be generated (given the DVD player has been setup correctly) and quality will be best. This is what Hollywood DVDs do, and I haven’t seen a letterboxed burned-in DVD release since the initial production of Pulp Fiction back in 1998.

[D James]

Charles,

Thank you so much for all that information. We can certainly try that technique for the DVD, however we still have the additional problem of having to print this documentary onto Betacam.

We would need to be able to do this directly from Final Cut, as trying to print a video image onto Betacam from a DVD just won’t cut the mustard.

It seems rather strange to me that Final Cut doesn’t feature a simple resizing filter that gives you a clean letterbox image (for analog output) from anamorphic footage. The technique of putting anamorphic clips into a non-anamorphic timeline produces terrible artifacting. Didn’t Apple know that people might need to print this sort of program directly to Betacam?

Just wondering… Thanks again,

James

[Martin Baker]

What you’re describing is a field mushing problem such as putting a field based clip into a progressive sequence and resizing it. Have you double checked your sequence settings? Are you working progressive or regular field-based?

Martin
Digital Heaven, London UK
________________________________________
Ten Final Cut Plug-ins for just $10 each
Multicam Lite – The first multicam solution for FCP

[D James]

I have checked as many sequence settings as I can in regards to field dominance, codecs and the like and nothing seems to work.

I have resorted to resizing the Quick Time export from FCP in After Effects using the stretch feature, and the result looks crystal clear on the Quick Time viewer. When I try to import that same Quick Time into FCP it looks all shimmery even though I rendered it with FCP codecs and matched the field dominance to my sequence (Lower field first, as it is DV footage)

Not sure what else to do. Thanks for the help anyway…

James.

[Tangier Clarke]

You can also try copying your footage from the timeline, pasting it to a 4:3 timeline, and under the motion tab distort the aspect ratio 1 clip to -33.3.

Copy that clip setting and paste it to the others.

i got here by adding a widescreen matte to my clip and adding a (color, like yellow or white) border to it. Then I distorted the vertically stretched image until the top edge met the border line of my widescreen matte. Then I deleted the matte and applied the distortion to the other clips.

It has worked perfectly for me.

As for laying off to beta – get a cheap Blackmagic card. Works great for me.

Tangier

[D James]

Thanks Tangier

As a matter of fact I did try setting the aspect ratio to -33% and that scales the image nicely back to letterbox format, but with the same old shimmer problem. I think the basic problem is that Final Cut’s own rendering capabilities going from anamorphic to letterbox are simply not strong enough to handle images with a lot of fine detail.

The solution I have come up with is to export the anamorphic edit as a Quick Time from FCP and re-render it in After Effects in 8 bit uncompressed FCP codec using the stretch feature in the render parameters (“stretching” down to 720 360 with stretch quality on “high”) This, by the way, gives a much cleaner result than scaling the image inside the composition window itself.

I then take that render and paste it back into After Effects in a 720 480 composition to get the black at the top and bottom and render another pass, still at the same FCP codec. You bring that back into Final Cut with the sequence settings at 8 bit uncompressed and you get a letterbox image with much less shimmer. The file sizes are much bigger than with DV codec but that’s the price of quality!

Cheers, James.

[Tangier Clarke]

Sorry you have to go through all of that – using another program. I have not had this problem dealing with media from a Panasonic SDX-900 nor currently the HD Varicam; using very detailed and h-rez stills in both projects.

If your solution works for you, then stick with it. I will share another technique though.

Sometimes I have found that no one solution works for every image, but I try these to get rid of the shimmer (depending on the media type):

1 – duplicate the track, deinterlace it on a different field than the original, drop the opacity 50% (or %60)

2 – just try a deflickering filter

3 – use Joe’s filters and apply the field blender

I am really curious about the problem you are having because I have never had that problem. Right before responding I laid to tape a 16×9 sequence and a 4×3 version of it using the distortion method I described above with no resulting shimmer. I too was working with 8-bit uncompressed using my Blackmagic card. That codec (since the card is Quicktime based) is pretty much the same as the Apple 8-bit Uncompressed.

Good Luck

Tangier

[Glen Jennings]

I’ve been doing exactly that with no luck with letterboxing!