FCP windowboxed my movie against my will - help!
 

Somehow FCP6 pillarboxed my footage. I don't get it. It only did this to one section of one captured tape. I obviously didn't shoot it pillarboxed or even widescreen. I cut other projects from the same session and it didn't do this. How do I prevent this from happening? Did I click a wrong setting somewhere? I hate pillarboxing, LOL.

Hi Jim

I'm assuming you mean "letterboxed" or maybe "pillarboxed"
Are you shooting in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio. What are your sequence settings in FCP ?

Andy

For it to automatically do it the clip in the bin probably has the anamorphic check box ticked. Scroll sideways along the clip data in the bin and eventually you'll see the anamorphic setting.

If you want to fix it, either uncheck this and replace the clip, OR simply go into the motion tab once you open the clip in the viewer and reset the aspect ratio to 1:1 in the distortion settings.

Pillarboxed? Never saw or heard of pillarboxed before, and it's been a decade or more since I've seen something windowboxed, so I guess I mistook what I was seeing for that. I have two black vertical bars along either side that shouldn't be there. Footage was shot 4:3 SD. Why on earth would abyone want to pillarbox something? Seems bloody useless to me.

I already completed editing the clip before I ever really noticed this pillarboxing error. I unchecked the anamorphic box, and that *looks* like it fixed the raw footage, but I tried the two other ideas offered in the second reply and it did nothing to my edited sequence. I didn't replace the clip--do you mean I need to reimport the raw footage, recapture the raw footage, or reedit the sequence?

Please tell me I don't have to recut the entire project to fix this... **bangs head against wall** LOL

Jim

If you're working with 4:3 source footage and are intending on a 4L3 output, yet you're still seeing this black pillarboxing then the problem is that your sequence is incorrectly set to be 16:9 and FCP has been automatically scaling your 4:3 footage to fit your 16:9 sequence.

So what you need to do is reset your sequence to 4:3 and then remove all the scaling and/or aspect distortion that FCP applied for you.


First dupicate your sequence before you make any changes you may later regret! (right click the sequence in the browser window and choose "Duplicate" from the context menu.

Next, click in the timeline window to make it active and then open your sequence settings (press Cmd-zero) and uncheck the "Anamorphic" checkbox that you'll see there.

Now select all the clips in your timeline (press Cmd-A) and then press Cmd-Option-V to open the Remove Attributes dialog

Enable the checkbox for "Basic Motion" and "Distort" , disable any other checkbox .. then press OK

Now take a look and see if all is as it should be.

Caveat: This will remove ALL Basic Motion keyframes and settings (Scale Rotation, Center and Anchor) and all Distortion keyframes and settings ... so if you have actually done any keyframing of these properties you'll lose that work!

Andy, thanks so much! Everything looks right now, although the "Basic Motion" box was grayed out and unselectable. I enabled Distortion. I wasn't using Motion (which I haven't learned how to use yet), so I guess that's why I couldn't select it. Anyway, my video looks good now.