Wrong direction anamorphic squeeze

bifter

bifter

Member
A friend of mine has shot loads of footage on her (non-DVX) Panasonic, but has made a big mistake you might be able to help with... She shot everything on her (new) anamorphic adapter, but had the squeeze horizontally instead of vertically (if I've got that the right way round!)

She can't reshoot, and uses FCP HD. What can she do?.

We've tried spinning the shots 90 deg, resizing to fit the frame, exporting that,importing, then treating that file as anamorphic - but it still looks wierd.

She'll probably pick up on this thread herself soon. Thanks for any help.
 
Well... that's a problem.

If I understand you properly, you're saying she had the anamorphic adapter attached but had it 90 degrees offset, right? So it was going top-to-bottom?

IINM, that would deliver a final frame aspect ratio of 1.000:1. Weird. Cool, but weird.

So, to "salvage" the footage, you'll have to unsqueeze it in a way that delivers a 1:1 aspect ratio, and live with pillarbox bars on the sides. I don't think you can have widescreen footage, but you could have a very unique square look to the picture. I always meant to experiment with that, but never got around to it...

You're using FCP HD, which I don't, so I can't tell you exactly what to do to fix it, but basically you want to squeeze the image in on the sides by 33%. You want to squeeze it such that you end up with 120-pixel black bars on the left and right. That should preserve the frame, give you a proper shape to your actors, etc., but it will leave you with a square image (quite the opposite of widescreen).

Post a frame grab so our FCP wizards can experiement with it and get back to you on the right process to use.
 
Thanks Barry, we'll do that. (Yes, it's squeezed top to bottom)

The experimentation we did led to a square image, and she is coming up with ways to utilise that inevitability in a creative way in her film. I think it could look pretty cool if we can unstretch the footage properly.

Watch this space for some screen grabs.
 
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