Exporting 16x9 24pa from FCP
 

I just got a Cannon XL-2 and have been busily shooting and importing test footage. I shot the footage in 16:9 24p with 2:3:3:2 pulldown and am editing in a 24 fps timeline. Everything is working great, until I try to export samples. For the life of me I can't get the correct aspect ratio on export. I would like to export some frame samples as well as some footage. No matter what I try, I still end up with a 4:3 squeezed picture. Do any of you know how to export the Anamorphic footage from FCP?

Thanks a lot for the help!

-Jason

You might need to use Anamorphicizer. It sets a flag in QT to indicate the correct aspect ratio. After exporting to QT, I drop my file on this & then bring it into iDVD. If I don't, I get a 4:3 squeezed image.

http://homepage.mac.com/sith33/FileSharing34.html

I'm having the same problem.

I don't understand why QT won't display it correctly. EVEN when you export as a quicktime movie and select the option for "DV NTSC 48kHz Anamorphic".

It would be absurd to spend so much on FCP and then have to use a separate utility JUST for exporting anamorphic footage.

The problem is that Quicktime doesn't support variable pixel aspect ratios on square pixel devices like computer monitors (or at least QT 6 doesn't, maybe they changed this in QT 7?).

If you want your 16:9 footage to look right on a computer screen using either Quicktime or still JPEGs then you need to manual scale it accordingly. So choose any size that works out to the 16:9 proportion. For full resolution scale the image to 854x480 for example.

If you're exporting a Quicktime movie I think you'll find this option under "custom frame size" or something like that. If you're working with stills, export a JPEG and then resize it in Photoshop.

But when you're working with anamorphic video nothing is wrong when it looks tall and skinny on a computer monitor. That's just the way anamorphic works, it's intended to be displayed on a widescreen monitor which will stretch it back to the proper proportions. So you should only resize if you specifically need to show it on a computer monitor.

Also note that you'll have the same problem with non-anamorphic 720x480 images, although it may not be so noticeable. If you want them to have the correct proportions you need to resize to 640x480, or any other size with a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Down and dirty method.

To export your footage to tape unsqueezed...ie black bars on the top and bottom...export your cut as a reference movie (not self contained), reimport it, drop it onto a new sequence (4:3 sequence) then under the motion tab go to the DISTORT option and type "-35."

Then render...

Now it will output to a 4x3 screen letterboxed.

If that's what you want to do then why not create a 4:3 sequence and just drop the anamorphic sequence into it. It will be letterboxed automagically. But I thought the question was how to make it appear in a 16:9 proportioned window under Quicktime...