How do I tell Final Cut Pro X that my DV PAL Anamorphic video is anamorphic?

First off, start with a new project. When the new dialog appears, you have a choice to custom your video and audio.

In Video properties click on 'custom', when this opens you then have a choice of HD with various settings, Pal, Ntsc etc... In the first drop down menu 'format' choose Pal SD, the next drop down menu 'Resolution' choose 'Pal anamorphic' Your rate will be automatically 25i

Can you switch between the two though? That was a very useful feature when prepping 16:9 material for DigiBeta playout.

Oh wait.... ah, yes... you can't playout to tape in X. lol

Thanks for the input. Unfortuntaley, at least for me this doesn't solve the problem. Yes, it generates an anamorphic project but if you import anamorphic media afterwards, they stay 4:3 squeezed, even in the anamorphic project. In earlier FCP versions you could tag the imported clips as being "anamorphic" to solve the problem...

Ouch, that is a horrible problem. Need to be able to change the meta data tag on anamophic as I often run into footage that is tagged the wrong way on this, does FCP X really just expect footage to be correct with no way to fix it.

Let's add this to the problems, everyone make a bug report to apple.

Agreed. I'm not finding any solution to that aside from doing a horizontal resize. VERY, VERY annoying, another basic feature that's been kicked aside. It was one of the first features I needed in a test project I started.

FCP7 made this easy, just check the box. Avid's similar, all video placed into a 16:9 project is played as 16:9 unless you specify otherwise. Similar concept.

Did editors beta-test this thing? This feature seems like it would be so widely used. It's an embarrassing oversight.

Guess we're the beta testers, with the privilege of paying for it. It's really a bit disgusting to have to purchase to see if basic features made it through the "final cut" in testing. You need a free trial for a program like this, especially with so many major changes and so many little things for people to test that wouldn't be seen in the tech specs pages. Avid does it, Adobe does it, it works great. 14 days, 30 days, try a few projects and see if it's a good fit.

Guess we're the beta testers, with the privilege of paying for it. It's really a bit disgusting to have to purchase to see if basic features made it through the "final cut" in testing. You need a free trial for a program like this, especially with so many major changes and so many little things for people to test that wouldn't be seen in the tech specs pages. Avid does it, Adobe does it, it works great. 14 days, 30 days, try a few projects and see if it's a good fit.

I totally agree, we are beta testing software that's feature set seems like an early alpha. I would be fine with it if it was not called Final Cut Pro, but Adobe or AVID would never lose this many features on something called an "upgrade." I have always felt that Apple has no real world editors on staff, and this release is just further proof to me.

Surely a horizontal resize is incorrect as it doesn't change the pixel aspect ratio?

Incorrect as it is, it's the best I've found so far. I'm not seeing any kind of pixel aspect switch. If anyone finds it buried somewhere, let us know. This is basic functionality that surely could not have been missed in beta testing...could it?

If it is indeed missing, this looks like the result of testing by home movie editors, iMovie users, and the like, who never have had to use even anything as recent as DV anamorphic footage, but rather use newer file-based cameras that shoot only 16:9 now - or, if they shoot in DV, don't think to use the 16:9 features. Or worse, wouldn't realize that 4:3 doesn't look right when stretched to 16:9, or vice versa.

All kinds of users need this and related functionality - documentary, news, sports, etc., who might occasionally have to pull up an anamorphic tape and incorporate it. How do you miss this, especially coming fresh off the transition to HD where these issues have been discussed in depth?

Again, if you want users to beta-test for you, at least give them a free trial. This is a shining example of a feature that one would not expect to see mentioned in tech specs/product briefs before purchase, as it is a minor feature in a long list, but becomes an appalling, disappointing surprise to a user after purchase. That is a terrible customer experience.

I am experiencing the same problem: I normally use iMovie to edit my anamorphic DV footage and iMovie shows this footage with correct aspect ratio. Now I just imported the iMovie events into FCP X (using the magical big convert button). After two crashes, FCP X imported the footage from iMovie, but doesn't show it in the correct anamorphic aspect ratio. And there seems no way to correct this in FCP.

A kind of solution for this problem is using Compressor to convert the original DV streams to DV streams with correct anamorphic tags before adding them to FCP X. After doing so, FCP X finally shows the footage with correct aspect ratio.

In Compressor, I needed to create a new setting for this based on dv stream and then change the aspect ratio setting (encoder tab) to 16:9.

Another (free) solution is using handbrake, but this tool converts your dv material to MP4. However, FCP X shows the converted footage in correct aspect ratio.

Wow Evertjan, that's rough. So you're telling us that FCPX has removed a basic feature of iMovie...

Thanks for the workflow "solution," at least we know something works. But having to actually convert your video files to make this happen, that's pretty unacceptable. I'm not too familiar with DV-to-DV workflow in Compressor - did you do some kind of audio/video passthrough so that all it did was simply add the 16:9 flag, quickly?

I totally agree with you that this workflow is not apple-like. I am a great fan of iMovie because of the workflow, which allows me to create great results in very little time. With using FCPX, I hoped to have more functionality for precise video editing and special effects. It seems FCPX still offers that kind of functionality in a user-friendly way, - once you managed to get your source materials right in FCPX.

In my set-up, Compressor didn't execute just a simple passthrough. It converted an original dv-stream to another dv-stream, which took some time (even on my quad-core iMac, about 12 minutes for 31 clips). But the result is just what I needed, so for now, I can live with it. Hopefully Apple does its job and will post a software update soon, however I can imagine they currently have other priorities to fix ;-).

I am also searching for ways to tackle this problem. This is surely a missing feature (intentionally?).

The quicktime movie needs the correct anamorphic tag. But the problem is that this does not seem to work for every codec. ProRes does work offcourse.

I tried the IMX codec because we have a lot of IMX material on our server and it didn't work with that codec.

Also modifying the 'actual size' from within Quicktime Player 7 made the movie playback with the correct aspect ratio in Quicktime X so I thought that would solve the problem, but it didn't. In a FCPX sequence it still has the wrong aspect ratio.

Then I thought I found the solution with the spatial conform parameter, but it didn't work either. (if you select the videoclip in the inspector under video is a section called spatial conform). It didn't have the correct options, I could only blow up the image so it fit the whole canvas.

Having same problem, footage imported as anamorphic 16:9 .dv in imovie plays as 4:3 in FCP, ridiculous oversight. Having to convert .dv to ProRes in Compressor to correct the problem, not good as I have hours of footage. So the free version deals with it yet the pro version doesn't. FCPX should have an anamorphic checkbox as in FCP7. Still think FCPX is awesome though.

There is no way to set the pixel aspect ratio that I can find.

However, set up a project to be DV anamorphic. Then click on a clip in your browser and then hit the info button on the far right of the screen. Click on the video tab at the top and then set the spatial conform to 'fill'. Every time you cut footage from this clip into the 16x9 project, it will be stretched to fill the frame. Needs to render though. Hope this helps. I don't know of a way to set all clips to 'fill' at once so you'd have to do each clip in turn.

"Stretched" being the operative word, James. I've tried this and it completely distorts the image. Not enough of an expert to explain why, but on a PAL image faces remain too narrow and pixels are cutt off at the top and bottom of the image. Not sure if your milleage will vary with NTSC, but I doubt it.

Best solution I've found yet is to download the "QT Edit" application which is part of this package: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/promedia/

It allows you to change "pixel aspect ratio" and re-save without re-encoding (or transcoding). Still not perfect though. While videos display correctly in FCPX, they remain in 4x3 in QuickTime Player 7 and in Finder's QuickLook. It's a minefield! Very confusing.