[Matt Stevenson]

Thanks everybody, so I figured out the problem after some of your suggestions.

(btw, the screenshots are from QuickTime 7, though QTX was having the same problem.)

It appears that when you shoot footage from a Canon HV40 camera in 30p, FCPX wants you to create an “interlaced” project even though it’s a progressive image from the camera. Back in FCP7 you would choose the 1080p30 sequence preset and it would work. Now it’s 1080i60. But when you’re done, even though it says it’s interlaced, it isn’t visually. Though, I still have no idea what Canon does to get their “24F” and “30F” laid down on the HDV tape properly. That’s a mind bender!

I was manually setting the project settings to 1080p thinking FCP was getting it wrong. Turns out that if you change the “Video Properties” back to auto when starting a new project, it will detect the 1080i60 wrapper correctly from the camera source media. The settings FCPX ends up using are:
1080i HD
1440×1080
29.97i (drop frame)

And yes, it does shoot in 1440×1080. QuickTime and FCP play it back as 1920×1080 by stretching the width out using the Pixel Aspect Ratio that’s embedded in the file. Here’s the HDV spec, if anyone’s curious.

So now the only difference between the export and the original is that QT has it’s presentation set to “clean” which crops off 10px around the whole edge of things. But that’s pretty normal.

Hurray! and thanks!

[Matt Stevenson]

good point, I’ll check the settings on that. There aren’t any deinterlace options in the export choices. But it may be the project settings I need to look at.

I wonder if it’s how FCP is seeing HDV progressive footage in an interlaced wrapper.