How to change DV/DVCPRO video to 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio in Final Cut Pro X?

In the video inspector there is a section called "Spacial Conform". You can see if changing that setting to Fill in a 16:9 Timle... i mean storyline will change the aspcet ration. I don't have any DVCPRO footage on hand to test with, but I would try that.

I have a suggestion but I don't know if it's the best solution.

You can adjust the aspect ratio once the clip is in a storyline. But you have to have a 16:9 storyline first. If your storyline was created in 4:3, go the the Project Library and select the project. Then in the inspector properties, click the wrench icon at the bottom right. Set the resolution for widescreen (I forget the numbers but I think there's only two choices there).

Once your clip is in the storyline, select it and in the inspector select video at the top. In the Transform section set the Scale:X to 133%.

Seems tedious I know but it works.

@Thomas Emmerich

This is a decent workaround. Fortunately my clips are named in such a way that I can easily drop them all in the timeline and do a Command-F (Find) to search by clip name, highlight all of them in the search results, then use the Inspector to modify the properties of all the clips at once. I have to change X-scale to 133% and Spatial Conform to "Fit", and now at least it fits the 16:9 timeline properly.

This in effect zooms the clip 33% along the x a-xis and they are no longer anamorphic 4:3

FCPX then renders the clip to this new 16:9size. All SD widescreen should be 4:3 anamorphic

Its your TV set that makes it wider to fill the screen.

I assume that after editng you will now have to reduce the wideth (re-render) to make your programme back to 16:9 anamorphic!!!!

FCX certainly is NOT for SD braodcast.

I had a ton of old vericam DVC Pro HD footage from an old shoot and wanted converted to pro-res for an edit that had more recient XD cam footage. I used episode pro, set up a batch and converted it to pro-res. Handled the scaleing perfectly and I kept the origional drive as a backup. Probably not the ideal way, as far as media size/storage but it worked great for me, and the edit went seemlessly

I think I figured it out. Create a new project with the 4:3 footage already inside FCP, in the new project settings choose custom NTSC SD/PAL SD and one of the anamorphic settings, hit OK, you will notice you have a widescreen viewer, and when you click on the already imported clip it will change to 4:3. The next part is important. DRAG AND DROP, DON'T RIGHT CLICK AND SELCT "ADD TO TIMELINE", the already imported clip into the timeline, and then brush back in forth with your mouse on the video clip you just DRAGGED AND DROPPED into the timeline, you will see the video itself is 4:3 but the viewer is still in widescreen! Now go to crop in the inspector, and select crop, NOT TRIM, and then crop your video to widescreen, yesssss!

DON'T RIGHT CLICK AND SELCT "ADD TO TIMELINE"

There's no such function. It's OPEN in Timeline, which is indeed something complete different.

Now go to crop in the inspector, and select crop, NOT TRIM, and then crop your video to widescreen, yesssss!

Don't do that. Go to spatial conform in the video tab in the inspector and set it to Fill. Isn't that what you want?

OPEN, ADD I think the users get the point. If you use spatial conform without cropping you lose way too much of the video, in my case at least. With crop you can choose how much bottom, top, left, and right video loss you get, you can also cut out clips to readjust the video position within the widescreen frame. The key here is to drag and drop, everytime I used "OPEN in timeline" the project would readjust itself back to 4:3.