Here's a real dumb question that I should know the answer on but don't.

I shot footage in HDCam and rented the JH3 with firewire and captured it into FCP as 16x9 Letterbox. I selected in my easy setup to capture with NTSC DV Anamorphic. Should I have used just NTSC DV instead? The funny thing is that dome of the clips came in anamorphic and some came in not anamorphic. The anamorphic has LB bands at the top and bottom in the viewer. The image goes all the way side to side. The image looks stretched also. The other clips look fine but have lb bands AND pb bands all the way around. These are the ones where anamorphic is not checked in the clip properties. The two versions was probably due to setting different scratch disks for different clips and I must have used a different east setup setting. Anyway the question is to properly output this to DVD, should it be anamorphic or not and how do I change one or the other so that all of the clips are the same.

Sorry for the basic question.

Jeff

I don't know anything about HDCam or JH3, but if you were capturing as NTSC DV then the anamorphic setting doesn't make any difference at all in the resulting clip. It's only a flag to identify how to display the video on your screen, not a change in the resolution or anything else. You can capture as non anamorphic, then simply check the anamorphic column in the clips properties as displayed in the browser. This will have the exact same effect as if you captured originally as anamorphic.

Are you really seeing letterbox bands in the viewer or do you mean the canvas? The only way you should see bands in the viewer would be if they actually exist in the clip (meaning your footage was not really anamorphic). Perhaps something was set wrong on the camera or deck when you captured.

OTOH, if you see the black bars in the canvas, then you have probably dropped an anamorphic clip into a 4:3 sequence. Without more info I don't think we can really tell you what's going on...

Thanks Boyd. I'll check the sequence properties tonight. The other thing is that when I clicked on clip properties and checked the anamorphic, the check populated but nothing happened to the clip. I then went back to the clip properties and the anamorphic was unchecked - it wasn't saved.

When I went back to my original captured clips, IE master clips, 2 of 7 are anamorphic (clip properties tab shows checked) and 5 are not (unchecked).

My goal is to have 7 multiclips in 1 sequence so when I render out the timeline, I want all clips formatted the same.

I guess I really don't know the difference between Anamorphic and Non except for one having square pixels and the other not. I don't know what I was supposed to use.

Jeff

Anamorphic means the 16:9 image was squeezed to fit in a 4:3, and on playback it must be unsqueezed. That is the only form of widescreen DV. OTOH, you can just shoot 4:3 and put a black bar over an above it for pseudo-16:9. This will be much lower resolution because you've wasted 25% of the image with the black bars. But with anamorphic you use all 720x480 pixels and (as you note) you stretch the pixels horizontally on playback to make it fit the 16:9 frame.

So you really need to know what you shot on the camera and how it was sent to FCP. On the Z1 for example, you can set the camera to downconvert as letterbox and that will give you a 4:3 frame with black bars. But it you set it to squeeze mode you get anamorphic 16:9.