FCP 7 not Capturing Anamorphic flag

To all

Ken Stone recommended I speak to you about a problem I have ingesting anamorphic material via FCP7.

Job: Capture 16x9 anamorphic pal digibeta to PAL 1920x1080 Apple ProRes 422 HQ quicktime. Capture via FCP. 16x9 Anamorphic presents have been created on every mac.

Problem: when viewing files in QT7 or VLC the files do not pop out to a 1024x576 window as I would expect. The files do not appear to have retained the anamorphic flag.

Below are the specs of the Macs, Aja cards, FCP and Quicktime

Mac 1:
Aja Kona LS
Control Panel 5.0
FCP 6.0.6
QT7 Pro 7.6.9

Logs clip: As anamorphic (confirmed in FCP browser)
Captures clip: Not anamorphic. DAR is 5:4 not 16x9. Flag is missing when imported back into FCP

Mac 2:
Aja Kona LS
Control Panel 8.1.2
FCP 6.0.6
QT7 Pro 7.6.9

Logs clip: As anamorphic
Captures clip: Not anamorphic. DAR is 5:4 not 16x9. Flag is missing when imported back into FCP

Mac 3:
Aja Kona 3G
Control Panel 8.1
FCP 7.0.3
QT7 Pro 7.6.6

Logs clip: As anamorphic
Captures clip: Not anamorphic. DAR is 5:4 not 16x9. Flag is missing when imported back into FCP

The only ways I know how to fix this is to:

1) Load into FCP and tick Anamorphic on and reexport
2) Open the QT Movie Properties, click on Video Track, click Visual Settings, deselect Preserve Aspect Ratio, change scaled size to 1024x576.

Method one is not suitable for bulk ingest as we are doing. We are ingesting thousands of features to this spec so it is too lengthy to re-export every file.

Method 2 only changes Display and Scaled Size. Normal size is still 720x576 and which QT now opens the file widescreeen other apps like VLC still play the file back anamorphic.

There should be a way to retain the anamorphic flag, forcing the players to pop the window out to 1024x576 as I have seen this at other companies using AJA 3G capture cards.

Any ideas from the experts out there?

Thanks!

What's your easy setup? Sometimes this can get in the way.

I think it is Apple Pro Res 422 HQ.

QT's handling and reading of the anamorphic flag is very very inconsistent from what I can remember. There were some formats that couldn't export with an anamorphic flag in past versions (I remember specifically uncompressed couldn't work well with anamorphic). And once I was trying to encode a bunch of HDV QTs to ProRes, and half of them transcoded to 1920x1080, the others transcoded to 1440x1080.

I suggest using Digital Rebellion's QT Edit found in the Pro Media Tools suite to change the anamorphic flag and then set the aperture mode to "production". It is not a free software, but highly useful and there is a free trial period, and it lets you append the QT metadata in batches.

[www.digitalrebellion.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

The strange thing is that anything I capture via Telestream Pipeline correctly displays as 16x9.

I will give the Pro Media tool a try though thanks!

>The strange thing is that anything I capture via Telestream Pipeline correctly displays as 16x9.

If it's SD FHA, the software needs to capture the clips as 720x576 (PAL), or 720x480 (NTSC DV) or 720x486 (NTSC D1), and then add an anamorphic flag, and set the correct aperture information. Telestream Pipeline may be able to add the correct metadata during capture. FCP 7 is flakey with this metadata on certain formats. But you can append the relevant metadata with QT Edit easily.

For QT Edit, there seems to be this very specific order of things to do to get it to work- first change the display aspect ratio, then change the aperture information- otherwise you will need to strip the aperture information and re-append the aperture information. At least that's the case on my work machine running Snow Leopard and QT 7.6.6.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks Strypes. I really appreciate the help. This has been frustrating me for days now!

Regarding the particular order of doing things in QT Edit, I have since contacted Jon Chappell, who runs Digital Rebellion and is also a mod on this forum about this particular bug. He has since addressed it, so the fix should probably be up. Hope you got it working.



www.strypesinpost.com

The fix is not up yet but it will be included in the next free update of Pro Media Tools.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Thanks. I'm getting some odd results. I select Set Pixel Aspect Ratio to PAL Anamorphic. If I only do this via Quick Tasks then the file remains unchanged. If I set the Aperture to classic then the file comes out with a DAR of 1.85:1 rather than 16x9. I'm trying tests using Encoded Pixels, Clean and Production as I'm not entirely sure what each is supposed to do. Either way it takes ages to process the files as it rewrites from scratch, effectively the same as ticking the anamorphic flag on in FCP and reexporting.

Alas, I don't think this is going to help me too much! :-(

QT aperture settings:

[support.apple.com]

>Either way it takes ages to process the files as it rewrites from scratch, effectively the same as ticking the anamorphic flag on
>in FCP and reexporting.

It doesn't re-export, but rewrites the headers in the file, so the process should be pretty fast, performance should be similar to conforming frame rate in Cinema Tools.



www.strypesinpost.com