Aspect Ratio woes
by Benjamin DeVoe
on
Sep 13, 2008 at 3:11:02 pm
First off, before I post I wanted to mention that I am in a third world country where my internet access is sporadic at best, so I apologize if this question is in the FAQ, because I cannot seem to load it.
The Situation:
I recently bought a Sony DCR610 Hybrid, on which I have been recording footage to mini-DVDs over the past few weeks. Now I am in the editing process.
Since my powerbook is unable to read Mini-DVDs (thank you macintosh, the video-friendly people) I have been forced to rip footage from finalized DVDs on my camera and convert them to NTSC 48 (.DV) with 'forced anamorphic 16:9', since I shot them in 16:9 HighQuality on the camcorder.
When I go to edit the footage however, it gets 'Letterboxed', with black bars on the left and the right. I have the Anamorphic 16:9 checkbox set, although the letterboxing effect occurs regardless of whether or not I have it set. Furthermore, footage I took in 4:3 DOES stretch to 16:9 w/o black-bars. Lastly, when I open the converted footage in quicktime and not the Canvas viewer, there are no black bars (nor do they occur in the FCP viewer when I am making subclips, just when added to the sequence).
What am I doing wrong? I imagine it stems either from some recursive FCP setting or from the nature of the footage. Please Help me Cowboys and Girls! There aren't video experts for hundreds of miles!
Re: Aspect Ratio woes by Michael Gissing on Sep 13, 2008 at 11:40:28 pm
[Benjamin DeVoe]"it gets 'Letterboxed', with black bars on the left and the right"
To avoid confusion, letter-boxing refers to black bars top & bottom of frame and pillar-boxing is black bars left and right sides.
As Jerry said, the sequence settings must be the issue. If you look at the motion tab on the pillar-boxed shots under distort it will have a value which is being set when the shot is dropped into the sequence. If you have the anamorphic flag ticked then the value should be zero in a 16:9 timeline.
