Wednesday 17 December 2008

exporting 16:9 from final cut pro

...has often been a pain in the arse. I am lazy, and so must confess I cannot really do much with DVD Studio at any great speed. This being so, I usually utilise iDVD to bang out quick product. However, a recurring problem is this: upon exporting a lovely anamorphic self-contained Quicktime movie, and importing it as such into a 16:9 build in iDVD, everything goes well until you play the film and it comes out at a crunched, pillarboxed 4:3. I have fixed this many times, and forgotten it again as many. So this time I'm blogging about it, as much for my own information as anyone else's.

According to Apple Support, the information that FCP 'speaks' whenever a 4:3 movie is actually an anamorphic 16:9 is not the same as that which Quicktime and iDVD will recognise. What is required is a quick couple of clicks in Quicktime Pro (bundled with FCP and FCP Studio products) to translate, as such.
Choose Window > Show Movie Properties.

In the Properties window, click Video Track in the Name column.

Click the Visual Settings button.

Deselect the checkbox for Preserve Aspect Ratio.

Change the Scaled Size:
For NTSC, enter 853 x 480.
For PAL, enter 1024 x 576.

Now the movie should be displayed at a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Choose File > Save to save the movie.


And you're done.

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1 comment:

David Lowry said...

You don't need to do that for dvd though... Maybe iDVD but the anamorphic encoding stores the odd shaped (wide) pixels and knows that when its cut to mpeg2 (dvd) to resize.
i.e. FCP 16:9->output "4:3 ana"->DVD->16:9 without any stops.

playback, yep, its a bit weird that QT wont just pick that up.

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