Exporting Widescreen Quicktime Coolness

[Gyro]

When you export your films in quicktime in widescreen format, how do you make the black bars vanish and the size of the quicktime window to be all widescreen like... you know what I mean?

[BrownCowStudios]

Crop off the black bars in your NLE (or in something like Cleaner XL) to make the footage anamorphic. When you export the file, either choose a pixel aspect ratio of 16:9 (1.2), or export with the pixel dimensions of a widescreen image (720x480 in 4:3 is 854x480 in 16:9).

[Gyro]

Are there any drawbacks to doing it like this?

[Epsilon]

This is kind of ironic. Most people have a problem wanting to shoot true widescreen on their cameras... my FX1 can ONLY shoot true widescreen DV. I guess they figure if I want standard aspect ratio, I can crop it in post production!

[cantoloupe]

u have an FX1? sweet deal

[Epsilon]

[windog]

haa. haa, cool cam, how much did that cost??

[Epsilon]

It cost me about $3,200.

[BrownCowStudios]

Are there any drawbacks to doing it like this?

If your final destination is the web, then no. In fact, cropping would be a better approach (there will be less data to compress). It'll be fine for web use.

If you're going to watch it on a 4:3 TV, then there is no point in cropping off the black bars. Just leave it as is.

If you're going to view it on a widescreen 16:9 TV, then the footage should be cropped to 16:9. However, it may be worth it to uprez the footage with a program like PhotoZoom (very time consuming and requires large amounts of disk space).

[Gyro]

It cost me about $3,200.

I hope you plan on making a decent film then! Burn!