[Shaun Seneviratne]

Hi Wayne,

I hear your pain! I was going through the same thing recently. I shot on 16mm, not Super 16, which has an aspect ratio of 1.33 or 4:3. When I sent it to the lab for processing and telecine, I received a pillarboxed video: my 4:3 image embedded in a 16:9 frame. This resulted in black bars on the sides as opposed to top and bottom.

I cropped these files with Quicktime 7 (the new one wont do this) and brought them into Final Cut. I set my sequence settings to be 1440 x 1080. This is when the weirdness started occurring. Some clips would come in 4:3. Some would come in pillarboxed. Some would come in with the 4:3 image stretched to fit the 16:9 frame. There was no reason why these clips should be coming into the timeline differently — they all went through the exact same process.

What you can do for your director is place a 1.33 matte on your top video layer. This will pillarbox the unwanted part of the frame. Edit your whole film this way. Once you are done, export your .mov and use Quicktime 7 to crop to 1440×1080. And then you’re set!

Here’s the trailer to the film I used this method on: https://www.crosstheseas.com

Hope this works for you!
Shaun