Letterboxed Quicktime Export Frustration

[John J. Heppe]

yeah, i'm sure there's an incredibly simple solution to this that i somehow overlooked after sifting through the output/compression forum for about an hour. all i wanna do is export 4:3 letterboxed footage into a quicktime movie file with the black bars removed using final cut express...is there any way to do this without having to resort to that somewhat complex and time consuming photozoom method? i just wanna have the 16:9 ratio for viewing on my laptop/uploading to the web, not for viewing on a tv or burning a dvd...

am i just having trouble doing this because i'm using FCE on my laptop right now, whereas it would be much easier with FCHD and Compressor?

 

[CaptainMench]

Not really --

With Compressor this is fairly easy as you can crop on export. Cleaner will crop on export also - but I assume you don't have either of them.

So --

Crop the video in FCE -- use the crop tool to get it down.

The size should be somewhere around... 720x405

Create a new sequence that is 720x405

drag the old sequence into that one. IF it doens't fit, use the zoom and aspect commands in the Motion tab.

Then EXPORT as normal... however, you'll need to check the size of the export in the QT Export dialog box and make sure it has a 16:9 ratio... (W/16)*9=H.

CaptM