letterbox ?

[Arty Gold]

i can’t seem to find the right way to do this

i have a video shot in letterbox (that new sony dvd camera)
i was able to import the video into fcp 5 to edit
now when i export it…how or should i say which way should i export it to a quicktime so that instead of the letter box showing up in the square box i can just have it look like a letterboxed screen (more of a rectangle)

any help would be greatly appreciated

thanks

[Ben Waggoner]

Was it really shot letterbox (with black matte at the top and bottom of the frame) or just 16:9? I’m not familiar with that camera, but most cameras always shoot full frame.

My compression blog: https://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/

My compression class at Stanford: https://digitalmediaacademy.org/courses/video-compression-training.html

[Arty Gold]

i’m not really familiar with that camera as well
but main question is or would be if the situation presents itself
if i did have a true letterbox piece of video what would i do to make sure
that it came out in quicktime let’s say so that the black bars were not showing ?

[Marco Solorio]

If your video truly does have letterbox bars on it, then you’ll need to crop the video on export so that it cuts out letterbox bars. You have a couple of ways to perform this.

1. Send the video to Compressor. From there, you have crop controls to take out the letterbox. Or…

2. Place the sequence you have in FCP into a new sequence (thus creating a nested sequence) and change the vertical dimensions of the sequence so that it crops out the letterbox. Export from there.

Unfortunately the standard QuickTime Export function doesn’t have a built-it crop feature which would be the easiest way to do this. Been a request of mine for quite some time!

Marco Solorio | CreativeCow Host | OneRiver Media | Codec Resource Site | Cinesoft | Media Batch

[Arty Gold]

thanks sooooo much mario !!!