[mattmarshall]

hello.

I want to turn some 4:3 digital video I've shot into 2.35:1 aspect ratio. I know that Final Cut Express and Pro both h ave a "matte" for this purpose, but it is not what I want. (this is really a 4:3 picture.)

I want the video itself to actually be 2.35:1. To do this, I would ned to crop the video. However, I don't see any option in Final Cut Express to crop easily crop it to 2.35:1......am I missing? Is it in FCP?

thanks

-matt

[Mark E]

i don't really understand what you mean..

the only way to get 4:3 to appear at 2.35:1 ratio is to matte it, as you've already said. what you're basically doing there is pasting black bars to the top and bottom of the picture.

"cropping" would be the same thing..

of course you know that cropping/matting to 2.35:1 means you'll lose about 45% of your picture.

-Mark

[Uncle Skeleton]

whatever it is you mean ( ), you can do it in QTPro. To squeeze (or stretch) the picture, you go to Movie -> Movie Properties (command-j) -> Video Track -> Size and press Adjust to resize freely. To crop, go to Movie -> Movie Properties -> Video Track -> Mask and you select a graphic file you've prepared that has white where you want to save the picture and black where you want it cropped. If you then want to add black bars to fill it in to 4:3, you open a black image file and copy and Add Scaled to your real video file. You can adjust layers in the Layer pane of the Movie Properties (lower numbers are more forwards), and you can adjust position in the Size pane