Curtis,

I use Cleaner to do this. It allows you to crop it at 16:9 or whatever setting you want. You have complete control of the cropping...so it's possible to not only crop out the top and bottom letterbox bars, but also the annoying black lines on the left and right that always appear with Quicktime.

I don't think you can do this directly in QuickTime. I've used Final Cut Pro to set a custom size for a sequence, then drop the movie into it. FCP will scale it automatically to fit in the new sequence, but not the way you want. Turn on wireframe view and stretch the image so the active part fills the frame. Then export back out as a FCP movie (which is actually a Quicktime file).

Thanks for the tips. I am not sure if I have Cleaner or not... does that generally come with FCP?

Anyway what I ended up doing is importing the movie into the timeline and adjusting the "disort" options until I had a perfect anamorphic image. I should of stretched it a wee bit to the left and right as well to get rid of the black XL1 bars (I have only seen these bars on the XL1 for some reason... not sure if any other) cameras do it. Then I exported at a resolution of 400x189 (2.1:1) and it worked out well.

FCP is resolution independent and can edit in virtually any format. The limitations are more hardware based and the budget to allow all the necessary peripherals. There are at least 6 boards available that will allow for uncompressed video. If you have additional questions, post back with your proposed budget and I'll make various recommendations on boards, drives etc.

Having media split across several drives can be a problem, especially the way you (and FCP) manages media. For best results under OS X the system and FCP should be on an internal drive. All the media should be on a different drive. This drive should be a separate drive and not a partition of the internal drive. Drives may suffer performance loss at around 80% if not fragmented. Try defragging and see if it helps.

Cleaner came with one of the very early versions of FCP, I think. But now it is a pretty expensive program. Sounds like you found a good work around.

DVX100 plug in and FCP4
 

Just got the FCP 4 upgrade and am suffering huge problems of confusion due to move from OS 9 to OSX.

I note that in the extras folder on the installation disk there is what seems to be a plug in which deals with the DVX adio sync problems. As far as I can tell there is no information about this in any of the documentation that came with the upgrade. So can anyone help with the following problems? I am sure that these are pretty basic but whilst I know OS 9 and FCP 3 I am tearing out what little hair I have left.

1. Where on earth do I install this? I can't figure out what folder all the plug ins have gone to. The FCP4 manual still talks about the old Final Cut Pro/plugins folder but in the Applications folder there is only the application and no folder. So where on earth are all the plug ins?

2. What does it do? I have the PAL 25p version so don't need any help with 24p. Does this plug in have any relevance to the PAL version?

3. How do I use it? What setting do I use to select it.

Sorry if this is very basic but again I can't find any clear answers in the 12 inch thick mass of documentation.

Go to the applications folder, click on the FCP app while holding down the ctrl key. A menu will pop up, select Show Package, go to plugin folder.

The PAL version may not need the plugin. It works automatically and there are no settings to select (the best of my knowledge).

audio cracks and pops; which audio filter solves this?
 

I have a bunch of miniDV tapes of concerts and outdoor events where the audio sounds really good, but in the background there is slight noise problems: popping and crackling a bit. I'm sure you've all heard something like this when the camera isn't held still or the audio is loud and then soft. Or the camera man has no idea what he is doing.

What audio filter gets rid or reduces these noises. I tryed a couple in FCE, but I soon realized that I have no idea what parameters to change or why. They did significant damage to the audio and clarity, which is what I don't want.

Does anyone half any ideas? Is there a noise rule of thumb setting out there?

thanks.

For low frequency rumble from microphone handling or some wind overload noise, try a low shelf filter at 75 Hz or so.

To keep the audio at a constant level, try the compressor.
This will amplify the quieter sounds.

For removal of occasional microphone pops, try the de popper.

For removal of excessive hisssing on Sssss, try the
de-esser.

For removal of a single frequency, try the notch filter at a narrow setting.

For hum removal ( with harmonics), try the hum remover.

Today's filters are not smart enough to know what you want to keep in your audio program. So, you may want to apply these filters on segments of the audio. You're in for a lot of work in audio cleanup.

ATA Hard Drives - where?
 

Hi,
I have an older dual 800 with 2 internal hard drives & 1 external firewire drive. I want to add inexpensive, sort of fast, disk space. I've looked at adding FW800 with striped drives and multiple channels - which sounds way cool, but I'm still in the poor cash flow stage and that is a little pricey for a older machine... So I see these adds for ATA PCI cards and I'm wondering - if you add a couple of cards, where do you put the drives? Is it safe (power wise, floating grounds, etc.) to run IDE drives to a external enclosure? Like maybe an old pc tower with a blown mobo? If not external, what do folks do?
Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Mark

HELP! New FCP 3 problems!
 

I transferred mini-dv/compressed files to a G4 FCP 3 system (that does uncompressed). When I playback, only audio is playing, not video, when going to tape. When I open a regular UNcompressed project, no problems with video or audio. Never had this problem before with transferring mini-dv/compressed files with playback before...

Any clues out there? We're using OS 9.2.2 and FCP 3.0.2 (don't ask why we're still on OS 9.2.2).

HELP!

heath@mpsdigital.com

This article explains how to add more hard drives to your G4:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...ata_drive.html

I got 5 hard drives in mine, installing them is very easy, good luck.

Setting to import 16x9 from Photoshop
 

Hey Guys,

Not being a Photoshop Pro and long since gave up winning the Nobel for Math, just curious about creating a Photoshop file to later be imported into FCP for some 16x9 work I am editing.

Thanks
David

Check FCP preference for monitor of playback. I don't remember them under 9.2.2. But playback of video can be changed. It is probably not active over FireWire at the present time. The uncompressed system doesn't use FireWire for playback.