Consumer Video Tips Q&A
Every week or so, we’re going to pick at least one question from our audience to answer on the blog. Hopefully, these answers will help everyone. If you have a question, send it to bournemediagroup at gmail.com.
Here’s today’s question from Robert Sorbo…
When importing a movie from Final Cut Express 4.0 into iDVD that was shot 16:9, iDVD stretches it even further on output.
I shot the footage on a Panasonic DV953 camera with its 16:9 mode. FCE recognizes it correctly, but iDVD does not.
I Googled it and found others that have had this problem and had success by changing the movie’ size in the Quicktime conversion.
That didn’t work for me. I did get the movie to burn correctly in Toast, but then it doesn’t keep my chapter markers.
Just wondering if you’ve heard of this and know a solution.
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It’s always hard to know the precise answer to something as complex as this Robert but in consultation with my buddy Alex Lindsay at the Pixelcorps, I believe this could be a problem related to iDVD misinterpreting the non-square pixels for square pixels and stretching them.
Our good friend QuickTime Pro
can help here. Just use QTP to convert to “pro-res” before sending the file to iDVD and all should be well.
This is probably a good time to point out that Apple’s QuickTime Pro (which is cross-platform) is a swiss army knife that should be in everybody’s video toolbox. It’s great for solving problems like this one.
I don’t think your solution will work. ProRes is a codec only installed with a Final Cut Studio install so it probably won’t be an option with FC Express. Try to export to a DV codec or uncompressed for encoding in iDVD.
ls
December 12, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Is I am going with Alex on this one. He can always be wrong, but absent proof, I will take his word for it.
scottbourne
December 13, 2008 at 12:39 am