Hi,

I almost feel ridiculous asking this, but is there a letterbox filter that I can put on the top layer above my video instead of on each clip? I'm looking for a 16 x 9 filter & the widescreen one only works on one clip.

Thanks

ahh.. like in that other app?

the answer is no,
but FCP is very flexible, and you can make it do what you want.
the most immediate way to achieve this is to layer 2 clips of slug above your video tracks.
crop one to be the top letterbox,
and the other to be the bottom letterbox.

not very elegant.

the BEST way, i believe is to make up a widescreen mask in Photoshop, and import that into FCP
it's one clip / one track, easy.
with good RT performance, and fast to render.

other approaches you can do in FCP are not so fast to render.
one way is to use slug with one of the Matte filters applied.
you could use 4 point garbage mate
or mask shape, set to rectangle.

one thing i discovered recently is that you can make up a letterbox mask in this way, then open it into the viewer, and make a freeze frame out of it.
this should give good RT performance and render fast, but i haven't used it in a real world situation, as i already had my Photoshop masks made up.

i haven't checked the quality on an external monitor yet, either.

cheers,
nick

Slug, huh? I like the Photoshop idea if I can figure out the correct size. Couldn't get the letterbox mask to open in the viewer without the picture attached.

The screens are going to be 45 feet wide and 15 feet tall...strange to cut to but
I'll go with the photoshop idea for now.

Thanks for the info Nick!

You can always apply the built-in screen, and then match the one you make to that to get the size right.

I think going from full frame to 16:9 in Photoshop is...

853x480 (full frame)
853x405 (with letterbox)

I'm not 100% sure, and you'll have to do the math, but I think that's right.

Or if you want to use the widescreen filter, just put it on one clip, copy the clip, then select all the other clips and use 'paste attributes' - click the 'filters' button - and the filter will be applied to all the other clips in one shot.

Personally I use a colour matte for this though.

Thanks, I'll check out the color matte.