Widescreen & FCP 6.0

M

MikeyPOTG

Active member
hey guys,
I've had my dvx100b for just over a week. I've shot & imported a lot of footage already using FCP 6.0, but somewhere I changed a setting and I don't know where I went wrong!

I'd like all of my footage to end up widescreen.

I originally shot it all in letterbox and I believe my FCP Easty Setup was set to:
Format: NTSC
Rate: 29.97
Use: DV-NTSC

When I first shot & captured my footage, everything went well. My footage was widescreen and on the FCP Canvas, the footage took up the entire screen, including outside of the Safe Title.

Somewhere along the lines I must've changed something. Now when I capture & edit, my footage doesn't take up the whole canvas. The sides get cut off and when I edit Letterbox footage, & its too small to even fit in the Safe Title area in my canvas. I even have to render the footage now, though that doesn't take long. I think it must be part of FCP, because I've since tried shooting/capturing with Letterbox & Standard mode on my DVX and it didn't change anything.

I hope I explained my problem well enough.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
 
Are you shooting squeeze or letterbox? Letterbox is just standard 4:3 with black bars matted and should be treated as standard DV. Squeeze is 16:9 anamorphic and should be imported and sequence with the anamorphic 16:9 checkbox checked in FCP.

Noah
 
I've shot normal & letterbox. The thing is, it worked fine before (imported normally without having to render & the video took the entire canvas). Maybe I'll try to shoot squeeze, but I imagine it'll be strange shooting with the video like that.
 
Check your sequence settings. FCP 6 can handle clips with different settings than the sequence. Compare the settings of your clips with the sequence and make sure everything is the same. You shouldn't have to render DV footage if the settings match, so this is the first thing I'd check.

Squeeze mode takes a bit of getting used to, but it isn't that difficult. I shot a short last year in squeeze mode with a non-flip 35mm adapter and no external monitor. Now THAT'S a challenge. :)
 
Thanks for your advice. I looked at both of my settings and it looked fine. I'll post some screen shots in case I'm missing something though.
This was shot in 24p basic, Letterbox mode, and my easy setup was on DV-NTSC

This is my problem, the footage not taking up the entire canvas (on top of having to be rendered):
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Sequence & Clip settings:
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If you just shot letterbox, then your pixel aspect ratio in the above screenshot shouldn't be CCIR 601 or anamorphic 16:9. It should be regular 0.9 NTSC DV (720x480)
 
Thanks for the response, Bryan.
When I opened up the Sequence Settings, it didn't give me an option to change the pixel aspect ratio to 0.9 NTSC DV (720x480) and when I unchecked anamorphic, the canvas window went full screen instead of "wide screen". Is there another way to change that setting?
 
Letterbox is "fullscreen" if you mean a 4:3 screen. It simply is a 4:3 frame with black bars on top and bottom of the frame, creating a 16x9 field in the middle...
Of course you loose resolution with that mode...
If you are shooting for display on 16x9 screens, use the "squezze mode" as NoahK described.
This squeezes a 16x9 frame into the 4:3 frame, which you later unsquezze to widescreen in your editing app....
For web display, you can crop the black bars and still get a pretty high res picture...
 
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