Graham Stewart
Forum Replies Created
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No, this isn’t about conforming to 16:9 anamorphic widescreen.
Quite simply, when I import 4:3 PAL into FCPX it shows up with small black bars down the sides in the event viewer — and the same when I put the material into a PAL non-widescreen project.
I can’t work out why the black borders are there? And whether the picture as-is is the correct aspect ratio, or whether I need to stretch along the x axis to get it to the true aspect or not?
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Yes, it works – to an extent.
Strangely, QuickTime Player 7 and the Finder’s QuickLook feature continue to incorrectly display the video in 4×3. QuickTime X and FCP X display correctly, though the former reports that the pixel dimensions are 1023×576, when it should be 1024×576 (PAL) – no idea what happened to that extra pixel! It works, but I’m just nervous something’s just not quite right.
Alternatively, I’ve found that using the “Transform” feature to stretch the image horizontally works perfectly well for me. It requires a bit of rendering time, but to my great surprise the results were indistinguishble from FCP7 using it’s anamorphic flag.
I always thought ‘stretching’ like this wouldn’t work, because it’s more about changing the PIXEL aspect ratio than the overall image aspect ratio – but does it make any difference? Perhaps someone with more technical knowledge can tell me!
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Doug Eli, I feel your pain having battled with this problem for some time! Given FCPX is founded on metadata, not being able to correctly date-stamp your clips means you end up losing a lot of FCPX’s organisational power.
Apps like “File Date Changer 5” and “Better Finder Rename” can be used to change the official creation date at the OS X Finder level, but if the material has been captured using FCPX (as opposed to an earlier version of FCP) FCPX doesn’t seem to pick up the amended date!
However, I’ve found the solution! Open the file in QuickTime 7 Pro and under “Window > Show Movie Properties” you’ll find the .mov file has an annotation called “Creation Date”. Just select it and “Remove Selected Annotation” then FCPX will successfully pick up the correct date.
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Rafael, actually I do recompress to DV, but only because the company I work for stores the content in Avid MPEG-IMX format. I think I’m correct in saying that acquiring such a codec for QuickTime would cost a lot of money and probably means purchasing an Avid NLE package? Grateful if you could advise?
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Thanks David, but the bars also appear in Final Cut (where there isn’t a “clean” option). The only alternative is to stretch the picture to get rid of the bars and hope the aspect ratio is reasonably correct.
Also, are you able to explain what causes it? Is it something to do with tape to DV conversion? I’m thinking maybe the DV convertor is sampling 768 square pixels, but because PAL broadcast is 720 non-square pixels, the black borders are accounting for the difference? However I still don’t understand why DV VTRs don’t account for this?
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Thanks so much Devin, doing both those things appears to have sorted my problems! Now I can hopefully use FCP X! 🙂
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Devlin, how are you getting anamorphic SD to work in FCPX? Are you simply taking in a squashed 4:3 video and scaling it? I ask because I have DV-PAL files which have a 16:9 flag embedded in them somewhere, and even though they display 16:9 in FCPX’s viewer the image quality is appalling. It’s as if FCPX isn’t able to correctly render it (whereas it does so fine in FCP7 etc).
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I am having similar problems with a newly purchased MacBook Pro 2.4GHz 13″.
Sony J-30 deck is not recognised by Final Cut Express and does not show up in System Profiler.
Strangely my Firewire external disc drive – which DOES work – also doesn’t appear in System Profiler.
It’s all rather odd… and very frustrating.
Have you had any resolution to your problems?