I have a project that about mid way through I switch from 4:3 to 16:9 for certain stylistic reasons. Now I'm shooting this on an XL2 and wondering that if I just import these two parts on different sessions (and changing the capture settings) will this work as intended? Hopefully, when viewing this on a 4:3 TV, the 4:3 sessions will be full screen, and when we switch to 16:9 in the movie, the black bars will appear over the footage. Is this possible? Thanks.

Is this possible?

Yes and no... From what you say, you are really working in 4:3 and simply want to letterbox the 16:9 footage. That's easy. But you cannot mix true 16:9 with 4:3, they are different formats. In 16:9 the pixels are stretched horizontally to fill the wider screen (hence the name "anamorphic" which comes from the Greek "changed form"). So to put 16:9 into your 4:3 project you'll reduce the size to 720x360 with a 60 pixel black bar above and below. In doing this you will be sacrificing some of the resolution of the original XL-2 footage which is 480 pixels high.

Anyway, it is extremely easy to do this in FCP. Just setup your 4:3 sequence as you normally would. Then capture your widescreen clips as anamorphic 16:9 (actually it doesn't matter how you capture, you can change the properties to anamorphic later if you prefer). Once you've captured everything, just drop them into your 4:3 sequence. FCP will automatically letterbox them to fit. You will need to render these however.

Is that what you want to do? The only other option would be to create a 16:9 sequence and drop the 4:3 clips into that. In this case, FCP will "pillarbox" these clips by adding a black bar to the left and right of the image. This would allow you to retain the full quality of the XL-2 widescreen images when viewed on a 16:9 monitor. But it would only make sense to do this if your target audience is watching on widescreen TV's.

My good friend Kevin Monahan from the San Francisco Cutters wrote an excellent article regarding this. You can find the article on Ken Stone's FCP pages at http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/understanding_16_9.html

There is also a SEARCH tool you can use to find articles and tutorials related to what you need to know about FCP at
http://www.kenstone.net/cgi/search/search.cgi

Best regards,

- don