I'm editing a 2 camera shoot in FCE 3.5; an SD camera in 4:3 and an HD cam in 16:9. Is there a way to export using Quicktime conversion so the 1280x720 clips will have the same height of the 720x480 clips, and the difference in the frame will just be the width. I know I can resize the HD footage and re-cut but want to know if there's a quicker solution. Thanks.

If you were using a later version of FCP I would tell you to simply drop the HD camera files on a SD timeline and zoom in until it filled the screen. Then edit the SD camera on the second video track. But I don't remember how 3.5 deals with modern HD files if at all. Otherwise, if you can you should convert the HD files to SD anamorphic and adjust the distort on the files until it fills the screen with undistorted images.

You can export the 720P files to be 852 x 480 square pixels (PAR of 1.0) as well and you won't need to worry about "Distort" or any other adjustments besides Position.

Does this take care of the ratio difference? My experience is that FCP will letterbox the widescreen footage with an automatic distort.

William, I've had FCP do different things at different times with anamorphic material so I just normally do a PAR = 1 resize and move on. Your mileage may very well vary... Of course, my method requires that the codec will SUPPORT an 852x480 frame size as well...

Thank you gentlemen, I'll let you know how it goes.

720x480 4:3 is not a square pixel setting, so it is possible that final cut will distort your clip automatically in the timeline. After you drop the clip in the timeline just take a look at it in the viewer and see if it's distorted, you can always just correct it -and paste those attributes to all of your other clips simultaneously.