Removing Letterbox for SD output for web

Hi. I imagine this is easy, but for whatever reason, it's stumping me.

I'm putting together my reel and I have files in a variety of sources, but most of them are SD 720x480. But most of these files were SHOT HD or HDV or in camera matted SD, or matted during the initial edit, but the upshot is that they are letterboxed to look 16x9 or in some cases 2.55:1, while actually being native 4x3.

So I'm trying to get them up on my website WITHOUT the letterbox, but in their correct aspect. I've been exporting qt movie, then converting them to flash via On2 Flix Standard (my website template requires flash movies), but don't know how to appropriately crop them to get them to look right. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Tom

I'll move this to the correct forum for you.

Thanks, Jeff. Sorry about that.

No worries. There are just different folks who haunt the different forums, and you've a better chance at getting the attention of somebody who knows what the hell "On2 Flix Standard" means over here.

You can crop using compressor. That would be the easiest way. Duplicate whatever preset you are going to, then go the geometry tab in the inspector and select your source inset to be the aspect ratio you want. 16:9 should do it for you automatically.

Then you can bring the files over to convert to flash.

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"What do you mean there's no undo?"

Matthew Celia
matt@fcpguru.com
www.fcpguru.com

You don't actually need to convert them to Flash. Just export them as H.264s from Compressor, change the file extension to .flv and Flash Player 9 and above will recognize them.

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Thanks to both of you! The cropping in compressor is working great. Just changing the extension on an H.264 file to flv doesn't seem to work though--when I upload it to my website it won't play. The service I'm using only accepts flv files and I guess can't read them for some reason...

The conversion to flv in On2 Flix Standard is now where the process is breaking down as the clips are looking really contrasty and pixelated, but am playing with different settings there. If anyone has any thoughts on that, let me know.

Thanks again.

Tom