Here is a problem that I ran into a while back. Exporting anamorphic (16:9) movies from Final Cut Express HD to iDVD does not work: iDVD does not know that they are anamorphic and so displays them as 4:3 movies, stretching them vertically. This problem does not occur with the Canon S3 video AVI format because the pixels are square -- nothing is stretched for display.

However for DV shot in anamorphic mode, as I do for all my movies shot with a regular DV video camera, this is a problem. The solution is to export the video as a reference Quicktime move from Final Cut Express HD with all the markers exactly as you would normally do, and then run Anamorphicizer on it. This utility sets a flag in the exported movie that is recognized by iDVD. iDVD then does the right thing and the move is burned to DVD with the correct aspect ratio settings. [Update: as was pointed out by a reader, you need Quicktime Pro to do this].

The movie exported from Final Cut Express HD will usually be a reference movie. Here is mine:

It shows up in the Finder with this information:

To get Anamorphiciser to process it, I drag and drop the icon onto the Anamorphicizer icon. Anamorphicizer will open the movie and display color bars for a short time, then display a dialog:

The movie will be opened at the first frame and the name changed to Shell.mov. I click OK to dismiss the dialog box and then from the menu bar, select File > Save As... The dialog displayed is a little odd:

The folder it shows is called Resources and it already contains some items don't look like anything I have created. This happens because the utility is actually showing me the Resources folder inside the application. I don't want to save my movie here! So I change the folder to a more sensible location, give the movie a name that indicates that it is wide now, and set the selection to save as a reference movie:

Hit Save and I am done. The icon has changed to a Quicktime icon:

But that makes no difference to iDVD. Drag that onto iDVD.

You can download Anamorphicizer from this page. There are two versions: one for Quicktime previous to 7 and one for Quicktime 7.

Tags: Final Cut, Anamorphic, 16:9, iDVD, Quicktime, Importing, Tips And Tricks