Anamorphic back to normal???

Hey. So when I was working at a community access center, and thus had limited time, I accidentally captured a wedding project in Anamorphic widescreen, and by the time I noticed, I had made too many cuts and edit hours to go back and do it right. Now that it is on a DVD, and I have my own G5, is there any way to import it and stretch it back up to full screen?

Thanks!
The people who look fat on the movie thank you too!!!

Yes, but you will probably lose some resolution.

Do you have black bars at the top and bottom of the screen? Do you have any black bars on the side of the screen? Are you viewing the DVD on a widescreen tv or a 4:3 one?

Correct. Black Bars on top and bottom, none on the side. Viewed on a 4:3 standard TV. Most of the time, within the movie, the stretch is not real noticeable, except on long shots...

So what do I do???

If you have a deck, connect your dvd player to the deck and capture the video back into FCP using non-controllable device setting in the capture settings window.

If you don't have a deck that allows e to e, you will need to convert the DVD Mpeg into something that fcp can work with. If you have Toast titanium, this will make a nice .dv file out of the dvd files. If not, get Mpegstreamclip, or DVDXDV to do the conversion to a file that FCP can work with.

Then, in FCP, import the clip and lay in on a timeline. Double click the clip in the timeline and go to the 'Motion' tab of the viewer. Twirl down the small black arrow beside the 'Distort' area and use the 'Aspect Ratio' slider to adjust the aspect until it is correct. This will most liekly be either 33.33 or -33.33 - I can never remember which does what.

The use the 'Scale' slider at the top of the motion area to enlarge the video to fit correctly into the frame again.

Render.

I think this is correct - a lot of this is from memory right now. If you get stuck come back and someone will push you further along.

If you had the original project and clips available, you might have done this:

1. Selected all the mis-captured clips in your Browser.

2. Control-click on the "Anamorphic" column and select "no". This removes the Anamorphic tag from all the master clips.

3. Now go into the edit and use Match Frame to call up each stretched clip. Since the master clips are now at normal, they will come back up normal in your Viewer and you can recut them back in.

Unfortunately, once an anamorphic 16:9 clip is in a normal sequence, you can't "unsquish" it without using Distort under Motion. Same for a 16:9 clip that's in a 16:9 sequence.

Aspect Ratio 33.33 will take care of the crunch but create black bars on the sides of the frame. Unfortunately, a positive-value Aspect Ratio crunch will pull the left and right sides towards the center and distort your picture that way. If you blow up the image to compensate for the missing sides, you'll lose even more quality than you already have.

I think you should try changing all the Y-co-ordinates in Distort to 320 instead of the default 240, ie. upper left is now -360, -320, and lower right is now 360, 320. I just did a test on a clip that isn't Anamorphic; I tagged it Anamorphic and dragged it into a non-16:9 sequence (thus crunching it erroneously) so that FCP would apply the -33.33 Aspect Ratio crunch on its own. Changing all Y-co-ordinates to -320 and 320 restored my original image.