Resizing video - Quicktime Pro ???

[eyelight]

I'm currently working on a project where I have a number of letterboxed clips in iMovie and need to export them to iDVD, but I'd like them to play without the grey side bars which iDVD seems to impose. In other words, to play as widescreen clips with minimal letterboxing on a 16:9 TV, (they are 1:85 aspect ratio so there would still be letterboxed). Side to side they should fill the screen though.

Now iMovie currently won't let me do this. If I start a new project in widescreen and import my clip, it will just put black bars on either side as well as the letter boxing.
If I upgrade to Quicktime Pro, can I crop most of the letterboxed area out, and give the clips a true 16x9 frame by altering the size?

Any help or ideas appriciated,

Thanks

 

[ppc_michael]

It sounds like what your asking is if you can anamorphicize video with Quicktime Pro. You could do this in QtP by cropping your video down to 16:9 aspect (720 x 405) and then rendering it again to stretch it to 720 x 480, then burning it in a 16:9 DVD project. I would warn you that you are going to lose a lot of quality, because you're pixelating your video as well as enlarging the preexisting compression artifacts. Also, QT's resampling is pretty horrid. If you have Final Cut Pro, I would do it in there for better quality. Finally, in the past, iDVD has treated all imported video clips as 4:3 unless they're coming from iMovie. I don't know if this bug has been fixed or not, but you should be aware of it.

My suggestion to you is to leave your video as-is and burn it as a 4:3 DVD. In 4:3, iDVD will not add gray bars, and your DVD player will add black letterboxing on the sides instead, on playback, assuming it knows it's connected to a 16:9 TV. This will also allow your DVD to play back correctly on 4:3 TVs, and all of this will be at a better quality than if you try to resample your video to 16:9.