fce - faking widescreen with crops and drops1

[rebequahclaire]

Hi edit wizards. I'm a FCE beginner and I'm editing a long two camera sequence and one camera is very wide and has too much head space to intercut well. I want to avoid zooming because of loss of quality.

Had the idea to crop the wide footage at the top then reposition (slide up) the image to top of screen -then add fake wide screen i.e black mask at top and bottom. For the other camera - this will be a simple mask top and bottom (no repositioning). This way i achieve a cool overall widescreen 'look' and the eye is more focused on the good stuff. Is this possible?

(I know about cropping - the question is is frame repositioning an option - and can it be a preset to use as required).

I welcome your advise! Much appreciated.

 

[evil_santa]

theres a filter called Andys Letterbox that you can use to save all the cropping, you place it on the top video track and it masks all below. That will save you a lot of cropping, and allow you to reframe the shots easily.

http://web.me.com/andymees/Free_and_Easy/main/main.html

to adjust the scale see this video.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0r2pcZ0Iw

 

[FSMBP]

There's a filter in Final Cut Express called "Widescreen".

You have a super widescreen option on it. Also, if you ended up needing to, you can reposition the frame (by moving the original image up or down without affecting the Widescreen Mask)