[Michael Shay]

Thanks for the insight and suggestions, Andy.

This project is an animatic/ripomatic for a vip fashion designer. I was given a number of various clips from the production company working on the project. Although it is just a ripo, the producer wants to really impress the designer with it. That being said, you may ask why in the world then would we be taking HD footage and editing it in a 4:3 sequence? I just work here.

Anyway, I got rid of the Anamorphic flag, but that didn’t remove/fix the automatic centre cut-out problem. Without making things to complicated, I really would love to know why FCP is cropping the clip automatically?

I have 8 different clips sized from 720×480 on up to 1280×720; it is of course the 1280×720 clips that are being auto-cropped. Unfortunately, I do not know what camera was used. I used Mpeg Streamclip to create QT Movies from a number of codecs (incl. mp4 and flv).

The final output will be a standard NTSC DVD, and this will only be viewed by the designer and the immediate suits involved.

[Michael Shay]

Hi Andy,

I think you’re tracking with me; it’s very unusual for FCP to auto-scale and auto-crop.

Unfortunately, none of what you suggested seems to work.

I’ve grabbed an image of the opened project for evaluation. Check it out:

Interesting, no?

[Michael Shay]

Hi Michael~

Thanks for responding.

Naturally, if I place a 1280×720 clip in a 720×480 sequence then I expect a necessary resizing of the clip in order for it to display 16×9 wise without any cropping. Actually, I prefer to manually resize the clip in the motion tab settings as you mentioned. But my problem is not with the resize as I’m quite able to do that; my problem is that FCP is auto-center-cutting (or punching) my clip to make the clip fit. As I said, I’ll make the clip fit myself. I do not want FCP to decide arbitrarily how the clip is going to fit in the 720×480 sequence, and I’m wondering if there’s a way to prevent it from doing that.

Make sense?