[Adam White]

Bret,

I hear what you’re saying – it’s less than ideal but times are incredibly tough at the moment and even $259 is just out of the question right now.

My thought is that this could be better than nothing at least! I’ve been caught out a couple times with footage that looks fine on iMac screen, but when testing DVD copies I’ve found that there’s been interlacing, colour issues e.t.c. on a TV Monitor. This solution would, I hope, at least help me avoid this kind of thing again.

Anything has to be better than burning a DVD to test different cuts – right?

[Adam White]

Matthew,

Thanks for response.

This is exactly the kind of set-up I’d like to achieve. Sorry to ask – but what settings did you use (I’m assuming this has to be set within FCP somehow) to get a full-screen preview on the additional monitor?

[Adam White]

Sure,

Give it a go. What was your source material shot on? Quality of your source footage obviously effects how acceptable it will look blown up.

FCP is pretty good at resizing so I think you’ll find you can just about get away with it! Try doing a test and exporting it to really see how it’s going to look in the final edit.

Good luck!

[Adam White]

Everyone has already given you great advice.

As Walter said, if you have people in your shot they will look bizarre if squashed to fit a widescreen ratio. Sometimes you might not want the image to be pillar boxed and you may not want a graphic in the background.

In this scenario, another thing to try is to click the 4:3 clip in the sequence, select the ‘Motion’ tab and go to ‘Distort’ options. Set the aspect ratio to somewhere between 30 and 37. This will ‘widen’ your image a bit but not so noticeably and you can avoid pillar boxing or backdrop graphics, should you not want to use either of those work arounds. The downside is that you need to blow up the image slightly to compensate. So, if you set the aspect ratio to, 33, say, you’ll need to put the scale to 133.33 exactly to fill the entire frame.

Obviously blowing up any image is never ideal, but I’ve got acceptable results using this method on some occasions. Not perfect, but another option anyway!

[Adam White]

Hi Bill,

I had the same issue once when capturing HDV material via Sony Z1 using the ProRes codec.

The problem for me was that FCP wasn’t automatically adding the .mov file extension to the captured files, so for some reason that caused the files to be “offline”, though as with you they were all in the capture scratch folder as normal. When I renamed with the .mov extension the clips functioned again.

Not sure if this is what caused your problem though – what’s odd is that it’s only every third clip that is missing.

That’s about as much light as I can shed on this (i.e. none at all!) but I have had a similar issue to you.