Change Video Dimensions?

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Level 1

10 points

Change Video Dimensions?

Is there a way to change the dimension of the video, during creation, or while exporting the file?

I'm creating a video, and seem to have 2 different video sizes, one is larger in physical dimension, than the other, but the overall video "play back" size is the same...one video has a lot of black around it, while the other files the screen. Is there a way to adjust this?

I'm wanting to put this video on the web, and the playback size is much larger than what I'd want on my website. Is there a way to make it smaller?

Also, I noticed, some of the video files wouldn't open in FCE, but would open in After Effects. I imported it to AE, exported it - I think it was QT, and then imported the video into FCE. It worked, but the video size always comes in at about half what the other video sizes are. Why? Is there a way to fix this?

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Jan 20, 2009 8:02 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

Jan 20, 2009 9:11 AM in response to louisegd

You do this in the timeline. You have to scale up the clips if you want them to fill the frame. Switch the canvas to Image+Wireframe in the view popup. Grab the corner of the image and drag it out.

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Answer 2

Jan 20, 2009 10:50 AM in response to louisegd

Hi(Bonjour)!

4 things:

-Yes video can be scaled up in timeline as suggested by Tom. But the resulting movie will be very pixellated as +enlarged clip+ equals +enlarged pixel+.

-To avoid bad quality +and as you want to put your movie on the web+, it's a good idea to scale down your final sequence (so enlarged pixel will be scaled down, showing less blocky aspect. You have to use +export with quicktime conversion+. Set your desired codec (search this forum with +web compression+ keywords to get some infos about best compression settings for specific use, also be sure to be conform to spec needed by your web hosting site) and set a smaller frame size (usualy 50% to 25% of the original frame size (example: 640X480 for DV NTSC give a 320X240 pixelas frame size)).

-FCE 4 is a fixed format application (mainly DV or HD in specific flavours). That's why non natively supported material has to be rendered. Final Cut Pro can works in many more formats than Final Cut Express

Adobe After effects can handle many formats too but there is alway a rendering process to output your movie.

-Quicktime is not a file format. It's a container format that include video and audio media composing the final clip. The codec used to encode the quicktime movie is the format. So one quicktime based file can be opened by one application that supports the specific codec used to encode the clip and another application cannot open it if the particular codec is not supported by application itself.
When you open a quicktime movie in quicktime player, use COMMAND-I to get infos about codecs used to encode the media in the quicktime file itself.

Michel Boissonneault

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