Editing: THE PROBLEM OF THE EXPANDING FOOTAGE

After months of hard work, Tom and I have finally reached the point where are subsiduary products are complete, and we are ready to export our short film! 

Or, at least, that's what we thought this morning.

After waiting the best part of an hour whilst Final Cut exported our film as a .mov file, it was with some annoyance that I discovered that, due to our use of digital zoom in a key part of the film, the aspect ratio of the exported file had encountered some complications. 

The footage at original size - how we want it all to look.

The footage having scaled up, expanding out into the letterboxing lines.

We had produced the effect of a digital zoom by setting keyframes to gradually scale up the footage at that particular point in the film, but a by product of this was that the footage broke out of the size-boundaries of all the other footage, effectively moving into the area otherwise occupied by the black 'letterboxing' lines. 

At the time, we didn't think this technique would bring us many problems; we assumed that, on export, the resolution of the film would revert back to that which we filmed in: 1280x720, or '720p HD', with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Unfortunately, in actuality, Final Cut wanted to export the film with a 4:3 aspect ratio. With this aspect ratio, the 'letterboxing' lines at the top and bottom were present throughout the film, apart from at the moment when digital zoom was used, where the footage could actually be seen to scale up; the edge of the footage expanding out into these spaces, eventually filling the entire frame, and then disappearing again to reveal the original 'letterboxed' footage.

Things were beginning to grate. Alas, I persevered.

It made sense to look deeper into the export settings, to see if the film could be forced to crop down into a 1280x720 frame. There was an option to select 1280x720 as the resolution for the exported file, so this is what I did. I was pleasantly surprised when the progress bar popped up in a small window which read '2 minutes' for the time remaining, but that pleasantness soon turned to agrivation as the estimated completion time rocketed up to 'about an hour.' 

Oh, the joys of edititng. 

After finding some useful tasks to fill this time, such as helping Tom to take feedback on the subsiduary products and working on my evaluation Prezi, I returned to the computer to discover that the exported file was indeed of the resolution 1280x720. The footage itself, however, was not. The 'letterboxing' lines remained, and the entire video had been compressed vertically - or stretched horizontally, whichever you prefer - in order to fit a 1280x720 frame.

Okay, now things are getting annoying.

Stuck for answers, Tom and I consulted the technician, explaining our problem, and our futile attempts to solve it. We were provided with some brilliant suggestions, but all brought the possiblity of further disadvantages, such as a loss of quality through repeated exports. Adamant that there would be another, simpler solution, I returned to Final Cut to examine the export settings once again. 

EUREKA! 

In the window where a resolution of 1280x720 could be selected, I had found a tick-box labelled 'Control aspect ratio', which came with a drop-down list with the option to 'Crop' the film. Hopeful that this was our final solution, I set all of the options to 'best' to ensure the highest quality result, and then clicked export. 

Another hour or so to fill with other productive things. 

Disappointingly, the film had been cropped closer to what we wanted, but not all the way. Although they were much smaller, the 'letterboxing' lines at the top and bottom were still present, and the problem footage could still be seen expanding into these black areas.

By this time, it was close to 3:00pm, and I still needed lunch, so it was time to give things a break.

Unfortunately, it seems that there isn't a lot more we can do to solve the problem; we can only really make the scaling of the problem footage less noticeable by cropping the film to reduce the thickness of the 'letterboxing' lines that the footage expands into. Because we want to export tomorrow, and with export times being what they are, we can't afford to spend time tweaking settings, because we have other lessons to attend, so this is the solution we will have to settle for. 

If we do succeed in solving 'THE PROBLEM OF THE EXPANDING FOOTAGE', I will, of course, post the details here, but until then, I have other work to do...