Importing still images into an Anamorphic timeline

I've looked around but haven't found a suitable answer for the problem I'm having, so forgive me if this has already been addressed here on the forum...

In the past, most of what we were working with was 4:3, but after upgrading cameras last year we're finally working in 16:9 native (Thankfully!)

In previous version of photoshop and fcp, I would format the stills in Photoshop before importing by "squashing" them with the old 720x534 to 720x480 trick to adjust for the square/video pixel difference before importing them into FCP.

If I try this now, but import the photos instead into a 16:9 timeline, they go wonky. I think FCP is trying to self-correct the aspect ratio, but even when I adjust that to 0 they still don't seem to look right.

Does anybody have a preferred way to pre-format images for DV anamorphic timelines?

Also, since the newest version of Photoshop can handle different pixel formats automatically, I've tried using the DV standard setting but it doesn't work when importing them into anamorphic timelines. Does anyone have a custom set of numbers for Photoshop that will work?

Thanks in advance for all the help!

-- Ty

A DV anamorpic timeline is still DV. Unless you are really using the HDV codec, your rules should not change, except that your Photoshop formula is still based on Square vs Rectangular pixels but with a 16:9 like video format (but not actually)

You need to start with an image that conforms to the actual size of an anamorphic frame which has less pixels that a true 4:3 frame and work forward in the same way. But on that note, there is a way to change the pixels in Photoshop from Square to Rectangular and than should get rid of the conversion issue in FCP.

If you're creating an image in Photoshop at 16:9 ratio and you still want to squish it to 720x480 before importing into FCP then that is a totally fine way of working. What you must do however is manually tell FCP that the image is anamorphic (because there's nothing in the Photoshop file to indicate this), so after importing the image(s), select them in the Browser and check the Anamorphic column. If the images are tagged as being anamorphic then they will display in the correct 16:9 ratio in the Viewer and when you edit them into a sequence.

Martin Baker
[www.digital-heaven.co.uk]
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