4:3 Footage Shot With Anamorphic 16X9 Lens in FCP4
 

I have a friend that needs to export a movie for the web. The footage was shot with a Panasonic 24p cam with a anamorphic 16X9 Lens. The footage in FCP is flagged for "Anamorphic". When viewed in the canvas from the timeline, the footage shows with no black bars, and WIDE. He needs to export this video for a web release. When he's exporting it now as "current" with MP4, he's getting black bars. Any help would be appreciated. The frame size of the vid needs to be cut by 50% or 75% for file size reasons. Anyone been in this situation? When he exports, the size of the vid frame is either too wide, or it changes to 4:3 with black bars. Thanks in advance,

Mike

When I do this sort of thing I generally export as a FCP movie at full resolution for starters. This will be an anamorphic video however, so if viewed with QuickTime on your computer screen outside of FCP it will have 720 x 480 square pixels and appear "squashed" with everything too tall and skinny.

So to create a full res Quicktime movie in the proper proportions you can use QuickTime Pro (which comes with FCP) to change the size to 854x480. So to make it smaller for the web, just divide those pixel dimensions by any factor. For example, 427 x 240 would be your 50% reduction. You can also change the compressor and frame rate settings to make the file smaller.

Now if the movie is long, or if you're tight on disk space I guess you could change these same settings in the export dialog right inside FCP, but I like using QT Pro for this. I think programs like Cleaner probably also provide ways of doing this, but I've never used them.

Thanks for the response, I'll let ya know if that works for them!

Mike