[Jeff Carpenter]

What are you trying to match? You should just use the Easy Setup and pick the HDV format. Then start a new project.

What version of Final Cut do you have? You need at least 5.0

[Jeff Carpenter]

I’ve noticed something in your terminology that might explain your initial confusion.

Here’s what’s really going on:

1) Image that’s full-frame with skinny people = Un-Squeezed, Original footage
2) Letterboxed footage = Squeezed down video

You’re calling #1 squeezed when in fact it’s not. That’s what the camera shot and recorded. #2 is the squeezed video.

It’s a small point, but it helps explain why you didn’t originally understand why Final Cut had to render the letterboxed version.

[Jeff Carpenter]

seems like FCP should support something like that though. where all image quality is retained, just unsqueezed during output
======

It’s a matter of computer hardware power. You’re asking it to re-arange every single pixel of every single frame of your entire video. Most modern Macs can do a pretty good job of this live, which is pretty amazing if you think about it, but they can’t promise that it will be 100% correct and free of errors or full-quality all the way through. So you have to render it.

[Jeff Carpenter]

How do i get the images going to tape to be letterboxed?
==========

You said it in your first post. Put it in a 4×3 timeline and render it. That’s what you have to do to get a letterboxed master.

If you want a letterboxed master, that’s what you should do, but I suggest ALSO making another master where everything’s squeezed. That will be your anamorphic master and it will retain full quality. The letterboxed version will look fine on 4×3 TVs, but if you ever want to copy the master to some other widescreen format or play it on a widescreen TV in the future, you’ll want to use the anamorphic master for that, not the letterboxed one.

So I suggest you make 2 masters, one letterboxed and one anamorphic.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Hotmail works the same way. The free version is only accessable on the web site. You have to pay for the version of Hotmail that will allow a mail program to check it.

This is Yahoo’s and Hotmail’s problem, not Apple’s.

[Jeff Carpenter]

It’s probably time to take it into a tech somewhere. Either an Apple store or just look in the phone book for an Apple-repair place.

This really sounds like a hardware problem somewhere. Whether it’s the hard drive, the RAM, the motherboard, or something else I can only guess at. I think you’ll have to have someone open it up and do some actual tests on the thing.

The ONLY other thing I can think of is that maybe the drive hasn’t been properly formatted?

Follow these instructions from the Apple web site and try re-loading OS X one more time before you take it somewhere. (This will erase ALL data on the drive.)

1. Insert the Mac OS X CD.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Immediately after the startup sound, press and hold the “C” key to start up from CD.
4. When the Installer screen appears, do not click Continue. Instead, choose Installer > Open Disk Utilities.
5. Select the hard drive to erase.
6. Click the Erase tab.
7. Select the volume format from the Volume Format pop-up menu. (Mac Extended Journaling On)
8. Click Options.
9. Select the checkbox for “Zero all data”.
10. Click OK.
11. Click Erase.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Sorry, typo. I meant to say $69.

[Jeff Carpenter]

While it should be possible to troubleshoot the cable-idea you have going and make it work, I would suggest that you forget that and simply buy this software:

https://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

I have a feeling you’ll get much better results and have more options with what you can do. It costs $89 but should give you much better results than trying to record an analog output onto a video tape.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Yes, feel free to blend them by having them each play out of each speaker and adjusting the levels to what you want. There’s nothing wrong with that, I do it all the time.

What everyone is saying is that you should leave them both seperate tracks in case you need to change those levels later. It’s very common where I work to do a rough cut at my own workstation with “ok” speakers and then move back to our main editing system and find that my audio mix is not quite what I wanted once I’m listening on really nice speakers. That’s one possibility of a change you’d need to make later.

Now, you may have nice speakers, but the point is that you can’t be sure you won’t want to change it down the road. Maybe it’s perfect now but next week you decide to put it on the internet. All of a sudden the mix that sounds great on a TV is hard to hear on tiny computer speakers and needs to be re-mixed with more lav and less boom. There are a dozen reasons you might want to change your mind later that have nothing to do with doing it “wrong” now. Sometimes situations just change and you have to make changes to adapt to them.

So yes, you’ll have to apply filters more than once. That is a wasted step and I can see why you’d want to eliminate it. But by saving a few seconds now you could cause BIG problems for yourself later. That’s not for certain, but it’s a possibility, which is what everyone here is worried about. We just don’t want anything bad to happen to you down the road 😉

[Jeff Carpenter]

You probably should. I think there’s a few other minor bug fixes. And when the next free upgrade pops up online I’m certain it will require 5.1 to load.

Well, then there’s a biggie…projects made in 5.1 can’t open in previous versions of Final Cut. Do you send projects to other people? If they have 5.1, you should get it. If they DON’T then probably you shouldn’t either! That’s probably the biggest issue.