Aspect ratio when nesting items
 

Hi there,

I'm making a couple of films broadcast safe (using that effect in FCP) and as a lot of the shots are over-exposed to certain degrees I'm nesting my items to speed up the process, but I only just discovered you can nest items (I must have been living under a rock last few years!) so bear with me.

My footage is DV PAL 16:9

For nesting DV PAL footage in FCP there is a 5:4 option and a 'custom' option from the drop-down menu.. I had two goes at this:

I'm not sure what the 5:4 aspect ratio is, so the first time I chose 'custom' but left the aspect ratio at the preset 720 x 576, and everything seemed to work fine but I'm not sure what aspect ratio my final export will come out as now. (Usually I change my already exported quicktime to 16:9 using quicktime - quick and easy!)

So I tried again by selecting 'custom' and changing the aspect ratio to what I think is 16:9 (1020 x 576, right?) and the nested 16:9 sequence displays in a black frame in the canvas (suggesting I have reset the aspect ratio when i shouldn't have?) and the braodcast safe effect doesn't change any of the clips and makes no difference whether enabled or not. That is to say I'm getting the lovely yellow exlaimation mark to indicate excess luma, even when the clip is present and enabled)

Any advice? Did I do it right first method or am I one strike away from being out...? :P

Thanks anyone who may be able to shed some light on this :)

Assuming that you are starting with 16:9 and remaining 16:9 you should have to do nothing but make sure your sequences are set up correctly with the standard PAL DV anamorphic sequence preset. Just for your info, 16:9 in DV (or any digital standard definition format) is a matter of how the pixel dimensions are interpreted, there are no extra pixels being recorded. The methods of filming 16:9 in SD are different from camera to camera but you always end up with a 720 x 586 frame size (or 720 x 480 here in NTSC land).

Cheers William,

You've made me a happy man!

I was just a bit thrown by the lack of a 16:9 option for nesting my clips.

Just to add. Nesting a 16:9 sequence into another 16:9 sequence just works. Dropping a 16:9 sequence into a 4:3 sequence will automatically letterbox the nested sequence. Visa-versa will get a pillar-boxed nested sequence.

Well that was what threw me, because I thought I was taking 16:9 and putting it into 16:9, and in the canvas it seemed to have kept the aspect ratio but added a black frame (pillar-box and letterbox!), or de-scaled the image in the process.

But it seems to work well enough selecting custom and leaving the preset at 720 x 576, so I'm not going to mess with it!

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge :)