what should my image dimensions be for 1080

[Shane Ross]

Whatever you want. The native dimensions even. FCP doesn’t distort the stills to fill the screen. You will have to zoom in to have it fill the frame though.

Shane

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[Alan Okey]

[Shane Ross] “FCP doesn’t distort the stills to fill the screen.”

Funny you should mention that…

I was quite surprised the other day to find that while adding 4:3 PowerPoint slides (960×720 square pixel .tiffs) to a 720p ProRes sequence, FCP decided to automatically distort and scale the stills to fill the 1280×720 frame. I wanted to keep the 4:3 stills at their native size, so that they would be pillarboxed in the 1280×720 frame.

It’s almost as if FCP saw the 960×720 resolution and automatically flagged it as being DVCPRO HD, then applied the scaling and distortion to make the still fill the 1280×720 frame. While this is a desirable behavior for video source clips, I don’t think it should be the default behavior for stills.

I can’t seem to find any way to turn this “feature” off. The workaround is to simply reset the scaling and distortion on the still in the timeline, but it seems odd to me that FCP would apply this behavior to stills.

[Eric Strand]

You should read this article…..I’m not going to attempt to summarize it as it has a lot of information.

https://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_grfx_look.html

[Roli Rivelino]

Wow, what a comprehensive and interesting article, thanks very much for that.

https://www.rolirivelino.com/

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Equipment
Panasonic AG-HVX 200
Firestore FS-100

[Andreas Kiel]

As Shane said, keep the proportions in square pix. For a 16/9 1920×1080 video it’s 1920×1080. If you want to zoom you might have to multiply the x/y values by the zoom factor.
The bad thing is that different apps/companies do have a different opinions how to handle square pix from a still within a non-square video timeline. Even worse is that this might change by versions of the app.
With FCP they are constant and you can rely on that, with Premiere/AE it has changed over the versions and currently it is different from FCP’s calculation. It’s the ever lasting fight about vertical blanking in the digital world. So you might experience a 3% horizontal for example with SD. Other formats and other NLEs might or might not slightly squeeze horizontal.

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools