Hi
I shot some anamorphic 16:9 with my XL1 and loaded it into FCP. I wish to use quite a few digital photos in this project. The photos are not anamorphic and look fairly ordinary when stretched.
Is there any way I can get around this problem so as the digital stills appear the same frame size as the video footage?

The only real way to get this correctly is to crop the photos to a
16x9 chunk (you can do the math on the pictures resolution) so
that the photos will be widescreen as well. Otherwise they will
appear stretched.

Yeah, it seems pretty obvious that you will need to crop the photos to fit the frame (unless you want to pillarbox them with black lines to the left and right). Crop and resize them in Photoshop so that your end product is 854x480. Then you can import them into your project and they'll be properly proportioned.

I haven't used FCP, but in Premiere, there is a menu selection "Maintain Aspect Ratio". This keeps images from distorting. Is there maybe something similar for FCP?

You guys might also consider a great little program called "Photo To Movie"--it handles photos in 16:9 just great.

I find it indispensible.

Keith: the only way that would work with a 4:3 picture in a 16:9
project is to pillarbox it. Otherwise you will HAVE to crop!

Jean-Philippe I have been cropping the 4:3 photos so far by setting their motion-scale in the viewer to 45 in a FCP4 16:9 sequence

What I want to do, if possible is keep uniformity through the project with out having to crop my photos

This question probably belongs more in an editing forum.....But can 4:3 photos be converted to 16:9 without appearing stretched....or vice versa with 16:9 footage dropped into 4:3 sequence?