Snafooed my project settings

P

Peem Washikiat

Active member
Howdy,

Much obliged for ya checking my situation.
I had what I thought was a project ready to print to video- dv. But it took my project and sqeezed it just a little. I aborted, took a look at my settings and more or less reset the sequence settings. Then my timeline went red- you know- as though I needed to render my timeline. I captured regular 720X480 footage and put into a 29.97 timeline. Some where things got mixed up. Perhaps I got some of those damn FCP training file settings mixed up in my stuff. Anyhow I threw away prefs. started over and did a test. Everything was fine. I tried copying my shots+transitions+titles into a project that was working however it kept the same settings or corruption that it had before.
So. I have a finished project. I am wondering how I can save it. It appears in the canvas tall and squeezed. I reset settings to no affect. Anyone with a brilliant plan?

Thanks for reading.

"Square one is a good place to leave graffitti"
 
(1) In the Browser, using the horizontal scroller, scroll a lot to the right until you find a column called Anamorphic (if you've hidden a lot of columns, then right click in the column names and turn it back on). See if this is turned on (a checkmark). If so, turn it off (this is for your sequence).

(2) Create a new sequence. Do nothing else. Then right click on it and go to Settings. In the lower left there is a button, "Load Preset." Click on that and from the menu find the DV NTSC 29.97 option. Select it and hit okay. Now go to the Timeline tab and change your timecode start value to whatever you need it to be for your output. Then go to your locked cut, press apple + a (highlight all), apple + c (copy), go to your new sequence you just made and press apple v (paste). If you digitized everything in DV and you chose the proper DV sequence preset, everything minus effects/color correction/etc should now no longer need a render and should look correct (aspect ratio).

Good luck.

cheers.
 
Thanks-

Turns out my browser did show the check in the box for anamorphic- - I unchecked it and my canvas showed my shots a bit fat, they were ok to view in the timeline without render but with the wrong aspect ratio.
I then tried creating a new sequence altogether using the ntsc dv 48kz preset and copied my time line content into it. My video was still fat- filling the height of the canvas leaving space on the sides.
Im still curious how my media/shots could be fine in the scratch disc and project browser and then become seemingly fixed with an aspect ratio/setting in the timeline.
It seems like settings for a sequence of shots should be able to be changed granted your not trying something that must be rendered.

Anyhow I finally remedied the situation- well if you want to call it that- by copying my sequence into a new sequence with the 29.97 preset. I then gathered my shots one by one from the browser-same project mind you and used the botched sequence copy as a map. It wasnt quite starting over but it sure did make me wonder about myself as an editor.

peace
 
Hey when you say, "filling the height of the canvas leaving space on the sides," are you talking about Pillar boxing? That would mean there would be black on both sides of your image (just like Letter boxing, except two vertical black areas on the sides instead of two horizonal ones on the top and bottom). If that's the case, the only thing I can thing of is that somehow the Distort settings (Motion tab) for your clips were all set to some peculiar value. Can't think of any sequence settings otherwise that would really mimic that scenario.

Or, when you said, "filling the height of the canvas leaving space on the sides," did you mean that the image looked stretched and the "space" on the sides was grey (canvas bg)? That would certainly be a wrong sequence aspect ratio then. When correcting something like that, FCP can be finicky on "refresh", so I tend to just make a new sequence (and sometimes in a new project) and copy and paste my cuts into there.

From you description of the problem persisting after copying your contents into a new DV sequence (did you use the load preset command?), I think it might be that the clips had their Distort settings adjusted. So when you copied and pasted, well you didn't change those settings so they copied over. If that is the case, you can highlight your whole timeline (apple + a), go to Edit > Remove Attributes, check off Distort and hit okay. Might do the trick if that's where the problem lies.

cheers.
 
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