I'm confused... I captured 4:3 footage into FCP5. Everything as far as I can see is ready to capture 4:3, not 16:9. But it's converting it to 16:9 when I drop it down to the timeline and I have to render. Perhaps I don't have the right capture setting. The aspect ratio was set to NTSC (4:3) showing the width as 640 & Height as 480. And I did not have the Anamorphic 16:9 box checked. Should I have had it set at NTSC DV (3:2) 720x480 instead? I don't have the opportunity to recapture the footage so will have to deal with re-rendering each time. But would like to know for next time. Any help is appreciated.

Joe

Joe,
If you shoot with DV, you should use the DV presets. NTSC DV's resolution is 720x480, and it uses non-square pixels. For now, if you can't recapture, figure out which capture preset you used, and adjust your sequence preset to match (bring up sequence settings and choose load preset at the bottom left of the dialog). Change your preset in A/V settings too so that when you create new sequences they will match your captured footage. If you already have footage in the timeline when you change the sequence settings, you will probably need to remove the distort settings (just use remove attributes on all of them and check distort). When your capture and sequence presets don't match, FCP distorts the footage to fit. It's an easy way to do letterboxing, and all the software is doing is applying the distort command.

Zach, thanks for your response. I alread have it in the timeline. So I tried removing the attributes. Only option that's shows checked is Basic Motion. All the other options are greyed out. I do not have the option to check anything except for unchecking Basic Motion. If I go ahead and remove atributes anyway in the timeline, it causes part of the video on the side to get out of frame. So looks like I'll be stuck with the letter boxing for now.

Joe

Joe,
If you shoot with DV, you should use the DV presets. NTSC DV's resolution is 720x480, and it uses non-square pixels. For now, if you can't recapture, figure out which capture preset you used, and adjust your sequence preset to match (bring up sequence settings and choose load preset at the bottom left of the dialog). Change your preset in A/V settings too so that when you create new sequences they will match your captured footage. If you already have footage in the timeline when you change the sequence settings, you will probably need to remove the distort settings (just use remove attributes on all of them and check distort). When your capture and sequence presets don't match, FCP distorts the footage to fit. It's an easy way to do letterboxing, and all the software is doing is applying the distort command.

It should be a very simple matter to fix this. The only thing which could cause this problem is a mismatch between the clip and sequence settings, so either the clips are set to 16:9 and the sequence is 4:3 or vice versa.

Check their properties in the browser - make the browser window as wide as you can and scroll it to the right until you get to the anamorphic column. If there's a check in that column for either the clips or the sequence(s) then that's your problem.

If the clips are anamorphic, click on the column to un-check them. If they are not anamorphic then don't do anything to them. Same thing for the sequence. Depending on how things are setup, you might need to create a new 4:3 sequence and drop the clips into it to get things right.

But regardless, it won't be necessary to recapture anything. The only difference between 4:3 and 16:9 as far as FCP is concerned is that the anamorphic column will be checked in the browser.

Try this and see what happens, there are some other things you can do if these suggestions don't work, but we need to find out what your exact problem is first.