Anamorphic to 4:3

So, I've got an anamorphic timeline with some 4:3 footage in it. FCP automatically centers it and my Quicktime layoff file is great. Plays 16:9 anamorphic with the 4:3 footage right where it should be. My boss comes to me and says that one of our clients needs just a straight 4:3 version. I'm thinking cool, I'll create a new 4:3 timeline and just copy and paste all of my edits into it, voila! Not so fast. The new timeline squeezes everything (even the black pillars) into the new 4:3 frame so that it's all thin and tall??! I know there's got to be an easy workaround. What I did was resize one piece of the footage and paste the attributes into the others. Seems to have worked fine but what am I missing? My original footage was captured 4:3 and the anamorphic tick box was never ticked? What gives?

The 4:3 material was placed in a an anamorphic sequence. That made it anamorphic. It's aspect ratio was adjusted to the aspect ratio of the anamorphic sequence.

> I'm thinking cool, I'll create a new 4:3 timeline and just copy and paste all of my edits into it,
> voila!
> My original footage was captured 4:3 and the anamorphic tick box was never ticked?

You'll need to remove the Distort and possibly Motion settings that were applied to make your 4:3 footage fit into that anamorphic 16:9 sequence. Those are retained when you copy/paste clips between timelines -- which would make sense; FCP would not arbitrarily remove your Motion, Filter settings etc. on a clip because it would assume you would want to keep those as part of the paste operation.

Select those clips and press OPTION-APPLE-V (Remove Attributes) and check Distort and Motion. This is contingent upon your clips not having other Motion and Distort settings that are intentional editing decisions.


www.derekmok.com

Once you get the image to play correctly, as suggested above, you then need to output it onto tape.

With 16 X 9 footage going to a 4 x3 frame you have three choices:

Center punch.

Letter box.

Pan and scan.

You've got to decide how to approach it.

Mark

16:9 going to 4:3 without letterboxing/padding means that you need to insert a 133% enlargement. Not so cool. Letterboxing would be your best option (unless the footage was shot on HD and the output is SD, then you can zoom in a cool 200% without the image going soft.

Derek's suggestion was right on, thank you sensei. Removing the attributes was what I needed to do. I should've thought of that.

The footage is 4:3 SD but was first edited into a 16:9 anamorphic timeline. I was trying to avoid having to re-create the edits for another format to output.

Thank you all for the teach,
Andre