[ This article was first published in the April, 2010, issue of
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Paul Kelleher sent this in:
I’ve been doing more research. Once again, here’s the issue: Anamorphic videos output from FCP would not play in iDVD as widescreen, even doing the old ‘change 720 to 853″ in QT properties ( which has often been necessary in the past to get iDVD to “LISTEN”)
My Discovery: Aperture display modes in QuickTime.
In my testing so far- starting with the same exported source file from FCP (which displays in iDVD as squished):
I can get the video to display correctly by doing the “change 720 to 853” trick ONLY if the aperture display modes are CLASSIC or ENCODED PIXELS. “PRODUCTION”, the default mode, is what originally displays the video at 873 (not 853) by 480. even changing to 853 in PRODUCTION mode does NOT fix iDVD- it still displays squished.
I’m going to investigate further, confirm with other source files etc, and try to actually UNDERSTAND what’s occurring but that’s where I am so far.
Larry replies: Paul, thanks for sending this in.
To access QuickTime’s aperture settings, open a movie in QuickTime 7 Pro, not QuickTime X. Then, select the movie in the track list at the top, don’t select the video part of the file. Finally, click the Presentation tab.
According to the article I read on Apple’s support web site, the best choice for 16:9 video is Production. However, experimenting with all four options to see which is the best won’t hurt anything. You are simply controlling how the video is displayed and imported into iDVD.
