Pls Help! Edited 4x3 in 16x9 sequence!

[Kelly Wilbur]

Hello,

Please someone help if you can.

I spent hours and hours editing 4x3 footage in a 16x9 sequence by mistake. There are tons of cuts that I can't bear going through again.

Now, no matter how I bounce and burn this footage with compressor, I can't view it on a normal 4x3 monitor without it being squeezed and with a black bar on the right and left.

I've tried every combination of the following parameters: Sequence settings anamorphic flag on/off, compressor bounce 4:3 and 16:9, DVD Studio burn at 4:3 and 16:9. No combination of any of those settings has any effect. The DVDs still look squeezed with black bars on the right and left on a normal 4:3 monitor.

There must either be a way to change the sequence or edit the entire video so that it is a different aspect (but I'm afraid that will degrade the quality).

Please, someone must have made this mistake once. There must be a way to undo it without re-editing everything.

Thanks,

Kelly

[Zach Mull]

Kelly, as long as you don't have conflicts with the timebase, it's easy to fix sequence/capture mismatches. Open the sequence settings for your anamorphic sequence (CMD+0), uncheck the Anamorphic 16:9 box, select everything in your timeline, choose remove attributes (CMD+OPT+V), check the distort box and leave everything else unchecked, hit OK and be happy with your 4:3 sequence filled with 4:3 footage.

If there is more than this going on and everything is truly screwed up then you can always load the sequence preset you want for the current sequence and replace everything using match frame and mark clip. But I bet the easy way will work.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Trying to understand what you're saying here....

In FCP you have 4:3 footage in a 16:9 sequence. When you hook up your camera via firewire and view this footage from the timeline on a 4:3 monitor connected to it, does everything look OK? I'm guess the answer is "yes," which is why you didn't realize you had a problem. But when you burn to DVD you get the problem, right?

If so then the issue is that DVDSP is seeing the anamorphic flag and making a widescreen DVD. I don't use DVDSP so I can't suggest any fix there. But I can think of two ways to deal with the problem in FCP.

It seems to me that you could just go to Sequence > Settings and uncheck the anamorphic box. That will squash everything horizontally. What happens when you do that?

The other would be to go to the timeline and export the whole sequence as a quicktime movie using the current settings. IIRC, the resulting file will not be identified as anamorphic. But drop that file into the browser and make sure the anamorphic column is not checked first. Now create a new 4:3 sequence and drop that file into it. Of course you will just have everything in one file now, and not a series of separate clips like the original sequence. Does that work?

Maybe I don't really understand what your problem is however. Try to describe:

1. What you see on the FCP canvas
2. What you see on an external 4:3 monitor via firewire

Are you seeing black bars to the right and left of the image on either of these? If so, then I only know one way to fix that. First, go to Sequence > Settings and uncheck the anamorphic box. Now double click on EACH CLIP in the timeline and click on its motion tab in the viewer. Click on the triangle next to the Distort property. Change the aspect ratio to 0. That will fix everything, but will require you to visit every clip. You could export the whole sequence and do something similar, but as you mentioned that would degrade the quality significantly.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Hah, you beat me to it Zach! That's an easy fix which I wouldn't have thought of. Wonder if it will work for him?

[Kelly Wilbur]

Boyd and Zach,

Thank you both very much for your detailed posts. Zach had the right answer. All I had to do was remove the "distort" and the picture was once again 4x3.

Thanks again. You've saved me hours and hours of work.

Kelly