Orienting footage shot vertically in FCP

Hopefully this is the right forum and since I didn't see a previous topic that addressed this idea, I'm creating this one.

I have some footage that was shot vertically on an HD camera and when imported into FCP, shows up vertically, stretching beyond the gridlines and with black space on the sides.

Is there any way for me to reorient this footage so that I can edit it properly?

Someone suggested rotating it to fit horizontally, exporting it and then rotating it in Quicktime but I'm not sure about that. Anyone have any ideas?
A still shot is below.

Thanks in advance.

--Chris

Let me guess, shot on an iPhone?

You can't create pixels that aren't there. This is why we tell people to turn their damn phones and shoot horizontally. People who say it doesn't matter simply don't know how human vision works.

If you want to get a wide image, you'll need to blow up the image drastically to fill the frame. You'll lose a huge amount of sharpness, not to mention a great deal of the information in your original frame (in the example above, you won't see much of the menu behind her, and you won't get her whole wine glass or her torso either).

What is the frame size of the original image? This is definitely a case where you should consider editing at a frame size smaller than the original. For example, a 1080x1920 image will come close to filling a 1280x720 wide frame even when rotated sideways.

Alternately, come up with an editing style where you use the image as it is, shrunken in the frame, and do something else with the black screen real estate left over.

> Someone suggested rotating it to fit horizontally, exporting it and then rotating it in Quicktime

Pointless. You'll still end up with a nasty vertical image that looks horrible when viewed on a TV, or on a YouTube/Vimeo player. If you do want a vertical image, then just create a Sequence that has those dimensions -- 1080x1920, for example.


www.derekmok.com

www.strypesinpost.com

You are going to have to render it with bars on the side in the format of your timeline and bring it back in to edit it...unless you do it in After Effects / Motion. I would design some kind of side bars to fill those areas (logo / particle animations / motion bkgd / etc).

Please tell whomever shot it this way to not do that anymore.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> You are going to have to render it with bars on the side in the format of your timeline and bring it back in to edit it...

Hmm, I don't quite get the logic of that, Joe. That just means you don't have to render, but you lose timecode, as well as all reframing options.


www.derekmok.com

I just had to deal with someone who sent me some footage and was suffering from VVS. What a great short film. Loved it.
Steve

steve-sharksdelight

Thanks for brightening my day excellent video.

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

Now there are situations where you would generate a vertical movie on purpose. (Notice I said generate, not shoot)

We had a client that had mounted their plasmas vertically in their facility, and insisted that they stay that way.

So, in 3d Studio I set up a normal 16:9 scene at 1920x1080, BUT rolled the virtual camera 90 degrees, so that
when it went to project on the screen it looked right.

But this was done in purpose......
Otherwise, vertically shot videos ARE bad!!!!