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Maintaining aspect ratio when exporting stills in Final Cut Pro
Exporting images out of FCP while maintaining the correct 16:9 aspect ratio. Left: exported tif image from FCP Right: corrected jpg image from Photoshop
One of the downsides to being out of the field for awhile is that you come across problems that you either forgot how to solve or have yet to figure out. Since this is my first attempt at an audio slide show using my Canon HV30 for the audio, I realized that some vital photos were only taken with the video camera while recording audio. Alas, a handy work-around allows you to utilize high-quality video images in your next audio slide show.
The first option is to take a screen capture of the video in the Final Cut Pro canvas window. However, the difference between the camera stills and video stills it is extremely obvious with this technique. Therefore, the second option is to make a freeze frame of the image, and export it from FCP “Using Quicktime Conversion” and then change it to a still image. However, if you recorded it in HD and, in my case, the FCP settings are at HDV 1080i60 (1440×1080 sequence settings), your image is squished back to 4:3 aspect ratio. Alas, the third option works perfectly …
This comes from my fellow colleague Evelio Contreras, now a videographer at Las Vegas Sun.
1. Find frame in FCP (sharpest one)
2. Hit Shift N which makes still
3. Drag back to bin
4. makes a clip which is just frame grab
5. double click that frame grab click
6. File – Export – Convert to Quicktime
7. Switch to “Still Image”
8. Under options choose TIF
Then it will be squared off a bit because the pixels have been squared instead of kept as rectangles.
So you have to open in Photoshop
Go to Filter – Video – Deinterlace (choose either option)
Then change width in Image – Image size to 1920 width which will stretch the image back to normal proportions
Save close
I don’t re-up the size, it should come about 5 mg or so, which is plenty big.
Hope this helps others you have struggled with this or may run into this problem in the future. (Thanks Evelio!)
Other posts that might interest you:
- Multimedia Tip: Editing and converting audio files
- Soundslides now facilitates video conversion
- How to Create a Multimedia Promo Widget
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[...] These videos here are just mockups. I will be making the actual flipbooks with Final Cut If you are wondering what I used to do these above, first I did a quick raw process to jpeg. I named the photos in a sequence, then when to quicktime, where I opened an image sequence (it’s in the file menu). You have a choice of frames per second. I used 2 fps for the girls and 6 fps for the others. An important thing to remember is that quicktime is used to dealing with square pixels, whereas video are rectangular. Thus, it gets elongated in quicktime, and to counter this, I exported at the true dimensions (3/2). Basically, this is the inverse of what you need to do to convert a freeze frame from a video into a pure still. You can see Tracey Boyer’s instructions here. [...]