Unsquishing 16:9 Still Image
 

Greetings, I shot a music video with the FX1 and am currently trying to export stills to post on the web. I exported as a PNG from FCP but the image is "squished". Did I do something wrong or do I need to just take it into photoshop to get the proper format displayed? And how would one do this?
Thanks in advance.

that's actually what I did the other day... I thought you could mess with the still export but on further inspection, I see that it doesn't seem that you can.

Also, no image sequence import... hmm...

If you export stills they will be anamorphic at 1440x1080. Using Photoshop you need to resize them to anything which fits the 16:9 proportion. 1920x1080, 1440x810 and 1280x720 are a few of the possibilities...

Create a true 1920x1080, square pixel timeline (not an HDV 1440x1080 anamorphic one).

Drag the anamorphic 1440x1080 clips to this timeline.

Export stills from this timeline, they should be truly 1920x1080.

Interesting idea. I haven't tried this with FCP5, but earlier versions of FCP were not as good at scaling images as the standard bicubic interpolation in Photoshop. Would be interesting to compare both methods.

FCP5 has greatly improved scaling over previous versions, though it's true, Photoshop would have much better tools for this job.

However, in FCP. this method would work adequately.