Help! Sequence Settings Issue

Dear FCPUG,

this is my first post on this forum. I need some help, and I thought that if you guys can't help me no-one can.

I am teaching a media course at an acting school. The assignment is to make a ten minute short film. Two of the students have shot their film on the Canon 7D. The files have been converted to proress 422, 25fps and the film was cut in FCP6.

The problem is that they set their sequence settings to DV PAL. This has led to some strange goings on. THe video has scaled down to 37.5% for most of the project, but on some of the shots it has scaled down to 40%. The shots that are scaled to 40% display at a different aspect ratio. When I changed the scale of the shots at 40% to 37.5% the aspect ration seems to be a little off, still. The shots are not quite wide enough to fill the frame, whilst the shots originally scaled at 37.5% are fine.

I've created a new sequence with settings set to proress 422. I've copied in their timeline and and changed all of the scaling on the shots to 100%. The shots that were originally scaled to 37.5% are fine, but the shots that were scaled to 40% are narrower, and are a little to small. These shots look as though they have black bars on the left and right side of the frame.

I've tried exporting an XML and an EDL, and re-importing but it's not helping. I've never come across a problem like this before, and I'm stumped. These two students have worked so hard on this assignment, and I'd love to be able to fix this problem for them. If anyone here could help I'd be very grateful.

They are working on a 21inch iMac. I'm not sure how much RAM, but I'd guess 2GBs

Thanks in advance,

Matthew.

> the shots that were scaled to 40% are narrower, and are a little to small.

When your HD, square-pixel clips were edited into an SD sequence, distortion was applied by FCP to account for pixel aspect ratio differences.

Select all the clips and press OPTION-APPLE-V (Remove Attributes). Check Motion and Distort and click OK.

Always check all the Motion settings when fixing an issue with having edited in the wrong Sequence.


www.derekmok.com

Wow, thanks for such a quick response. I shall try this first thing tomorrow.

Thanks again,

Matthew.