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Settings and workflow advice badly needed
Hi I need help!
I’m not used to working in widescreen, so all of the various setup and rendering options in FCP are making me nuts.
OK first of all — I’m using Voltaic to convert footage shot in the highest quality setting of my Vixia HFS10. The file dimensions come out to the expected 1920 X 1080. By the way, I’m using the VoltaicHD default settings cuz I’m working on a G5 Power Mac with Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 — the ProRes codecs are not available on that.
Anyway — comes time to set up the project properly for this footage and I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried using the “Easy Setup” DV/NTSC Anamorphic — and exporting my Quicktime using “current settings” — and something just doesn’t look right. The footage doesn’t quite fill up the screen — no surprise when the rendered product dimensions are smaller than the beginning footage was.
So I’ve also tried lots of “custom” combinations in both project setup and rendering — but just don’t know what is correct. Sometimes things look stretched out, sometimes squished, sometimes with letterboxing above and below the picture — etc etc. After a while it all runs together. I keep checking the results by going the long way round the barn and burning (widescreen mode) DVDs of each try and viewing them on both old 4:3 tube TVs and my brand spankin new Sony HDTV. Mind you, I’m making SD DVDs here — not blueray — but the resulting video should still fill up the screen, shouldn’t it??
All I’m looking for here is a way to work with this footage so that the end result is actually WIDESCREEN — or whatever you call it — filling up the whole 16:9 TV. And it would be nice if the picture was in some way acceptable to viewers using the old 4:3 sets.
Any advice on the proper way to do this would be appreciated.
Steve
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2 Replies
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Can you post a sample of the video so we can see what problems you’re experiencing
Chad Tingle
Producer/Editor -
Hi Chad
Thanks for responding so quickly! I was just about to post an update — and that is that I finally worked the problem out. All it amounted to was working in HD 1280 x 1080 16:9 setup and rendering out in QT conversion using DVC Pro HD1080i60 compressor setting.
Pretty obvious really after I put it aside for a while and then came back to it.
Thanks again!
Steve
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