I am having trouble maintaining the my frame ratio (video is 16:9) when I am importing stills and adding a zoom motion to them. The stills have been sized properly to the 16:9 ratio when they come in, but once I go the motion controls and set the keyframes for the motion, the zooming works but the whole images gets bigger as it is zooming. I want boundary to stay the same but to zoom in on the image. Please help.
What format sequence are you working in? If it's 16:9 and you zoom into the image there should be no apparent change in the aspect ratio. Are you working in a 4:3 sequence with a letterboxed image?
Yes, I am working in a 16:9 ratio. When I zoom in the aspect ratio does seem to be maintained, but since I am zooming in the image is obviously getting larger, much larger than the 16:9 video sequences adjacent to it. So, if I export the movie to Quicktime, you will see the video sequence at the proper size on the monitor with black borders at top and bottom, and then when the zoomed still comes up in the sequence it will fill the monitor completely. I just want make sure the still fits into the same frame size as the video whether it is zoomed or not. In other words, I would like to crop that zoomed still so that it is within the same bounding box as the video. Hope that clarifies it. Thanks so much.
"So, if I export the movie to Quicktime, you will see the video sequence at the proper size on the monitor with black borders at top and bottom,"
The black bands on top and bottom is letterboxing. You should not see that when you export in widescreen aspect ratio. You should not see that in the Canvas either.
I am new to this, so my explanations may be confusing. Let me try to explain my issue again. When I produce my final product I would like to it to be at a 16:9 ratio. From your last response it sounds like I should be able to achieve that through exporting in quicktime. All my video footage is already at 16:9. For the stills I am resizing them in Photoshop (taking into account the square to non-square pixel conversion) and bringing them into Final Cut Express. When I add zoom motion to those stills the image then fills the 4:3 view in the canvas. My video already looks letterboxed in the canvas, and I would like the stills to look the same.
Can this be solved simply through the exporting process or do I need to modify something in FCE? Whatever the solution, my goal is to maintain the highest resolution possible. Thanks.
If you're editing in 16:9 you should not be seeing letterboxing in the canvas. It sounds as if you are editing into a 4:3 sequence. If your easy setup is DV anamorphic, make a new sequence and see if it looks the same as your edited sequence.