how to Un-do HD stretching

i am editing a music video shot on 16 mm film. we telecinied to hdsr and digitized to prores 422 (hq). i had no technical issues with this footage. everything has looked and functioned very well... but i decided to use two clips from footage i shot several years ago. this footage, also 16mm, had been telecinied to digibeta. i took the tape to alpha dogs and had it digitized to prores... it looked fine, but then i realized it wasn't hd, and of course the assets weren't compatible. so i went back to alpha dogs and had it digitized again, this time in hd. the assets are now the same. but the image is stretched. .. is there a way to "unstretch" this in fcp?

all help is greatly appreciated.
jim

> i went back to alpha dogs and had it digitized again, this time in hd. the assets are now the
> same. but the image is stretched. .. is there a way to "unstretch" this in fcp?

If the footage was from DigiBeta, that means it's either 4:3 aspect ratio or it was letterboxed. So the question becomes: What did you do to the footage to make it fit an HD capture? Could it be:

1. They simply captured the 720x486 image into a 16:9 HD format, which would have resulted in the image being horizontally stretched out to fill the wider frame. You'd have to apply probably a value of 33.33 in FCP's Motion - Distort - Aspect Ratio to correct this;

2. They letterboxed your image to a 16:9 shape (which means you lost the top and bottom of your original image), then captured the area inside the letterbox as an HD 16:9 clip.

You didn't tell us which format of HD (or frame size) you're editing, so we can't give you more specifics. However, it seems to me as if you may have wasted some steps and possibly some money. Did you actually ask Alpha Dogs to upres your SD footage to HD? If not, then they may have simply captured the DigiBeta 720x486 image in an HD codec, and you gained no quality, just a larger clip that's still representing a lower-quality image. Which means you could have done the conversion yourself using the older SD-quality clips.


www.derekmok.com

hi:

the digibeta was 4x3, and had been taped off top and bottom to simulate widescreen.

my projects specs are 1920 X 1080, 23.p8 fps, with square pixel aspect. when i took the digibeta from the years earlier shoot to alpha dogs, i told them simply that i wanted to use this footage in a prores project. so, they converted it to prores, at the existing 720 x 486, 29.97 fps (i converted it later in cinema tools to 23.98) ntsc - ccir 601 pixel aspect.... i should have told them i was working with an HD project. ... so, when i saw the problem, i read up and learned that i could and should convert to hd, so i went back and in a cost-saving effort, up-graded to hd only select clips. those clips now have the exact specs as the rest of the project, only they appear grossly stretched...

so, do you recommend fixing with distortion? and if so, after the clip is "distorted," do i simply put it back on the timeline as is? it's a smaller frame size, so do i have to increase the scale? ... i hate doing that!

or, can i put the clip through compressor and change the pixel aspect to ccir 601... which apparently you can do, and leave the frame size alone....

i'm very new at this, so sorry if i'm not real clear...

jim

does the stretched uprez still have the letterbox from the original Digibeta?

If it does, then you need to have the tape re-digitized and have them crop to a 16:9 frame size rather than stretching the video.

it's the same image width, only compressed. ... i've called alpha dogs, and they are going to re-digitize the digibeta. i told them exactly what you said, that it should be cropped to a 16:9 frame. they say they can put in a letterbox format, allowing me to crop it later. .... does that make sense?

again, thanks.

jim