URGENT: situation

[sethro]

:badputer:
Hello,
ok, so here is the situation...

I was going to be shooting a short film for a contest on my GL-1 camera. An oppurtunity arose for me to shoot with the HVX-200 w/p2 card instead. Obviously I jumped at the oppurtunity, even though I knew little about the format/settings/specifics of the camera. Those who lended it to me agreed to take care of uploading the video from P2 onto my FCP 6, as I didn't know the process. We shot at 720, 24 and uploaded it. The people who helped upload it put 960x720 aspect in the settings when they loaded the footage.

All went well with editing until....

The end of the film has an animation that was done in flash, we did the animation on a 960x720 canvas, but when we brought it to FCP, somehow it became stretched out. Then I began to panic thinking, oh crap something is off with the aspect ratio of my footage and may screw it up when I load it onto YOUTUBE (the host of the contest) . So i decide to test out the footage by loading a 2 second clip of the footage onto youtube. To my misery, the clips i uploaded were entirely washed out in grey.

I only have a few days to get this loaded onto youtube for the contest. Does anyone see any issues that I may have hit in this process? Could it be that the aspect ratio of the footage isnt truly 960x720? Could that explain the stretch of the flash animation? If so, how would I go about discovering the true aspect ratio of the footage? And does anyone understand why the footage becomes destroyed when loaded onto youtube?

I know I sound like a complete rookie but the truth is I am when it comes to HD. Please somone, enlighten me. Any help is always appreciated!

Seth

[RyanT]

Oh man, it's something dealing with the pixel aspect ratio, but I've been battling with this forever. Just trying to get decent stills out of final cut. I never really tried to solve the problem, but I'm sure someone will come in to save the day soon enough.

[Noel Evans]

720p comes from the camera at 960x720 square pixels and looks squished if played in a 960x720 timeline. When those pixels are place over a true 720 sequence which is 1280x720 the image is stretched and looks how it is intended.

Your problem is your image is true 960x720 and when stretched - it looks well stretched.

You will need to reconfirm your animation to 1280x720 (in flash)

Hope it works out.

[mrWr0ng]

your footage is 960x720 because it is anamorphic. resize it for 1280x720 (its true size) and then import it into a DVCPRO HD 720p24p timeline and it'll be fine.

[Noel Evans]

Isnt that what I said?

[sethro]

you guys cant understand how much i appreciate the rapid responses, so thank you first of all. more testing and i have conquered the youtube grey problem, though the image is still squashed when loaded onto youtube. With that said...

How exactly do I resize all the footage to that proper size in FCP?

Does anyone know how to reconform the flash animation without starting over?

[Noel Evans]

I dont know flash at all, but isnt there something like frame size?

[wgzn]

how are you going about exporting the footage out of fcp? if it looks good on the fcp timeline, there is no reason it should go all wonky on youtube, unless something is amiss in your export procedure...

[VenezuelanD]

Seth,
I don't know how to help you with flash. I doubt much can be done, the footage will look slightly squashed.

If you're really set on getting it right there is one way I can think of that might work (not sure, can't test at the moment) but if you can export the flash animation as individual frames
then open them in photoshop you should be able to create a new image 960x720 and set the pixel aspect ratio to 1.33 (they call it HDV anamorphic i think)
drag your flash frame into this new photoshop document and save it, it will not squash it (as it would if you simply changed the aspect ratio of the flash frame) but you would have horizonal bars on the animation frames. (basically like when you watch SD tv in an HD tv, you get horizontal bars)

This is the only way i can think of that would preserve aspect ratio.

As far as getting the footage to not look stretched in Youtube, I think you are exporting a file that is anamorphic and youtube is simply reencoding it whatever its preset is (crappiest FLV compression at 4:3).
What you need to do is export the file as 4:3 with bars, so that youtube doesn't stretch the image.

I can't get to my apple at the moment so I can't be 100% on what i'm about to say: but basically when you export, use compressor, and in the settings make sure you chose a 4:3 aspect ratio. Compressor SHOULD (as I recall) automatically add bars and maintain your image aspect ratio.

Since this is all ending up in youtube, I just thought of something:
You said the animation only comes on at the end of the film correct? You could export the live action footage to say DV/NTSC 4:3 with bars .mov, and export the flash animation also as DV/NTSC??? since 960/720 4:3 aspect ratio and then join them together?

This way you 'd have the original footage in widescreen (With bars) and the animation play fullscreen.

I havent used FCP 6 yet, but couldnt you simply create a standard 4:3 timeline, dump the HVX edited footage into it (simply double click the HD sequence so it shows up on the viewer, click on the new sequence, and press apple F10 (or F9) and it should dump your edited sequence into the new one) and then bring in your flash animation (since its 4:3 it should scale nicely) and export the sequence?

Hope some of this makes sense, I'm going to bed

[sethro]

ok ill try some of that stuff, but yes it is odd that the footage looks fine in FCP then whenever I export it (even before its on youtube) i can see that it is squashed for some reason.

So how exactly do you change the export settings to fit 4:3? If my math is correct isnt 960x720 a 16:9 ratio?

[THoff]

Isnt that what I said?Nope. You said the footage from the camera uses 960x720 square pixels -- they are non-square (anamorphic).

[VenezuelanD]

No.
16:9 is 1.77 ratio.
4:3 is 1.33
960x720 is 1.33
1280x960 is 1.77

[mrWr0ng]

Isnt that what I said?

basically, but the reason why (anamorphic) might help him get a better understanding of why his footage is turning out the way it is. no offense intended.

[Noel Evans]

Nope. You said the footage from the camera uses 960x720 square pixels -- they are non-square (anamorphic).

Absolutely correct, not sure how I bungled that it doesnt even make sense.

The important part was OK at least.

MrWrong I did interpret that later - should have mentioned.