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Compressor 3 – Geometry – crop & aspect ratio
Does Compressor 3’s Gemoetry Tab make sense to anyone?
I have DV source file with 16:9 letterboxing, and I want to make a 16:9 web quicktime w/o letterboxing. Should be easy enough, right?
In the Gemoetry tab, I’m selecting: Crop to 16 x 9
And in the Dimensions, I’m selecting 480 x 270 Custom 16:9, square pixels.
In the Preview window, the left side source cropping looks fine, but in the right side, it looks anamorphically squished.
And the resulting quicktime is overcropped and anamorphically squished – it looks normal if stretched to 2.35:1 – but it’s way overcropped at that point.
Toggling between the different views in Preview yields completely unpredictable results – sometimes it’s cropped, sometimes it’s squished… WTF?
Anyone understand how to use this geometry pane?
(the manual is no help at all, of course…)
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5 Replies
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No, it should not be easy to make a letterboxed file into a widescreen file in Compressor. That would require the type of controls in the FCP motion tab, such as crop and scale. That’s not what Compressor does.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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I used to do this all the time with Compressor 2, and it was pretty easy enough for me – just setting the crop to crop out the top and bottom and the custom pixel size of my choosing. It sounds like you’re doing that in Compressor 3 and still having problems… I’m not sure exactly why. But if you could do it in Compressor 2, you definitely should be able to do it in Compressor 3. I haven’t played with Compressor 3 that much or else I could probably be of more assistance… just keep trying!
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Paul Escandon
Producer | Director | Editor
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Oremus Productions
http://www.oremusproductions.com
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Adjunct Professor of Media
John Paul the Great Catholic University -
You’re starting with anamorphic video, or letterboxed video? You don’t need to crop the anamorphic video. You just want to set the geometry to resize it to square pixels. You would use the crop with letterboxed video to crop off the letterboxing.
Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog -
I’m using letterboxed video, not anamorphic.
This is very easy to do in Sorenson Squeeze, and I was able to do it in Compressor 2, but it was clunky.
Comp 3 seems to have quite a few inconsistencies…
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It took me a bit of experimenting but the settings i came up with for creating a 16:9 (or there about) are as follows in the Geometry tab. Set crop to: Custom Top: 50 Bottom 50 Dimensions 480 x 260 Custom. That’s it. Worked well for me. This is in compressor 3 working with a 16:9 image in a 4:3 letterboxed timeline in FCP
Tim
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