Having written an article on editing Canon S3 video with Final Cut Express, I thought I would see what iMovie can do with the footage. I don't need FCE for many quick movies, so iMovie is the weapon of choice.

I create an iMovie project and select DV Widescreen since I want a wide screen aspect ratio:

The raw footage from the S3 is 640x480 so it will not fit the aspect ratio of widescreen 640x360 and the result is black bars on each side:

I have to chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of the image before importing into iMovie. To do this I open it in Quicktime and export it using Apple Intermediate Codec (you probably need the Pro version to do this). The video settings are like this:

And the size settings are set to Custom with the width and height set so:

I elect to crop the top and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio of the source. The resulting movie is about 75% of the size of the on I started with -- about right considering that 1/4 of the area has been removed. This step is also a good opportunity to shorten the length of the clip by not exporting any footage at the beginning and end that will not be used.

Now importing the clip makes it fit the frame:

And it is ready for editing.

Tags: Canon, S3, Widescreen, Movies, iMovie