Exporting to QuickTime - 4:3 being stretched to 16:9

YouTube seems to have turned it in garbage, but I guess that's a whole different issue. So the image isn't actually being stretched as you said in your first message, it's being pillarboxed. And I guess this is the way it's appearing in the QT player, a pillarboxed image in a widescreen frame. What does the QT player say it is in movie info?

There is no problem. They are both the same, and the same as the canvas in FCE. In the zoom popup on the canvas there is a check mark for Correct for Aspect ratio. It's on by default. If you switch it off it will look like the QT player. When it's switched on the video is displayed at 4:3, the display aspect ratio of DV, the equivalent of 640x480 in square pixels, which is what computers use. DV is not in square pixels. It's in rectangular pixels. It's dimensions are 720x480. Do the math. That's not 4:3. That's why the item properties for the clip says the pixel aspect is CCIR601. The pixels have a ratio that is 0.9. The pixels are taller than they are wide. There are more of them horizontally to make up a greater horizontal resolution. But computers can't display pixels that have a 0.9 aspect ratio, only square pixels with an aspect of 1.0. The QuickTime player is showing the video the way it actually is, 720x480, 3:2, not the corrected aspect ratio of 4:3 that you see in the Canvas in FCE, or you see when you export to MPEG-4, where it's resized to 640x480.

Please give the exact item properties of your media. Please give the item properties of your sequence. How exactly are you exporting? Where are you trying to export to?

What version of FCE and QuickTime are you using? There has been no update to iDVD for a couple of years.

Tom, I updated to iDVD 7.0.4 in early Jun 09. My FCE is 4.0.1 and QuickTime is 7.6.2, also updated in early Jun 09.

Where do you see the stretched video? In the QT player, or just in iDVD? I've tried every combination of QuickTime Movie setting and FCE DV setting available and just cannot reproduce this behavior.

If you are seeing the file correctly in the QT player you might try burning with Toast if there's a problem with iDVD.

You don't mean the end of sequence indicator, do you?

But that's not the format that's displayed on YouTube. In the QuickTime player do you see the pillarboxing that's in YouTube? Maybe you can put up a screenshot of what you see in the QT player.