widescreen quicktimes

[Michael Buday]

Make sure that you designate the proper height and width for the movie you wish to export. For example, I’m currently cutting material that was shot 16:9 anamorphic on Digibeta, but since it’s NTSC, it’s native screen dimensions are 720 x 480. In order to properly export a widescreen version in QT, I set the dimensions to 720 x 405, which reduces the vertical height to the correct aspect ratio for anamorphic SD material.

Incidentally, if you have QuickTime Pro, you don’t have to re-export your movies to achieve the correct dimensions, just:

– Open the movie(s) in QTPRO
– Open the WINDOWS–>MOVIE PROPERTIES menu
– Select the VIDEO track
– Click the VISUAL SETTINGS tab
– Change the CURRENT SIZE settings to the correct dimensions (uncheck PRESERVE ASPECT RATIO) and re-save the file

Michael Buday

[Ben Holmes]

Nothing wrong with Michael’s answer, all totally correct. If, however, you want to use your quicktime for anything else (and don’t want FCP to re-render it a different size, which could cause a longer export) I would recommend the advice he gives for changing the playback resolution in Quicktime Player. It leaves the movie untouched as an anamorphic full resolution file, if you ever want to bring it back into FCP.

Personally, I always stretch the horizontal dimensions. If you want the math, since you are going to 16:9 just divide the vertical height by 9 and multiply it by 16 to get the correct horizontal figure to change your sequence to – so for PAL SD you end up with 1024×576… Nothing wrong with shrinking the vertical either, just like ’em big, and the playback seems to behave the same 😉

Ben

Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.

Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com