Center cropping anamorphic clips into a 4:3 timeline
by Mike Turner
on
Jul 16, 2008 at 7:34:45 pm
I have SD anamorphic clips and need to finish a 4:3 edit. I am dropping them into my timeline and they are either squishing or coming up letter-boxed. To get the proper perspective I've had to scale the clips to 134% and set the aspect ratio to -33.33. The footage looks fine but I am concerned about image loss. I am going at this correctly?
Thanks,
Mike
Re: Center cropping anamorphic clips into a 4:3 timeline by Russell Lasson on Jul 16, 2008 at 8:05:17 pm
For some reason it looks like that's how FCP deals with the footage.
It makes sense though because anamorphic really is the same resolution as 4x3. They're both 720x480. So if you want to cut off some of the edges of the anamorphic, you're really using something like 480x480 to fit within a 720x480 frame size. So that's why you would scale the footage to 134 and then squish it by -33.33.
The other option would be to take the footage into Motion or AE and render out a 854x480 clip and then use that. If you use AE, you could nest a widescreen comp into a 4x3 comp and I don't think AE would scale it to make it would. It would probably look better than the FCP option.
Re: Center cropping anamorphic clips into a 4:3 timeline by Mike Turner on Jul 16, 2008 at 8:12:20 pm
I actually tried to do something similar by exporting one of my clips as 853x480 and dropping it in a 4:3 timeline but I still had to scale up 13%. Thanks for your suggestion, maybe I'll give Motion a try.
Mike
