FCP footage into iMovie 6

Question

My colleague and I are working on a FCP 5 project (1080i/50) for a local artist. All goes well on this but last night, having little to do in my life, I thought I would give iMovie 6 HD a try and so imported some of the footage we captured in FCP into iMovie 6. The footage imported OK but it is slightly compressed with a black bar down the left hand side. Is this normal?
I set iMovie to 25fps (PAL) before opening a new project and selected HDV 1080i from the options presented when creating a new project.
The footage was shot in HDV mode on a Sony HVR-Z1E. Should I have recaptured the footage through iMovie?

Answer 1

I'm just trying this for you right now..
I'm importing into iMovie HD 6 some HDV (1080i/50) footage which I'd captured into FCP 5.1.
Note that FCP captures differently from iMovie HD, not using Apple's Intermediate Codec, so this footage has to be transcoded into AIC when importing into iMovie HD. It's taken about six minutes to import a 1:39 minute clip of 318MB.
The result is - as you say - a movie with a broad black bar, about one ninth of the movie's width, down the left edge.
This suggests to me - I'm going out soon, so this has to be just a quick first appraisal - an aspect ratio oddity, to do with rectangular vs square pixels, see below.
Nothing appears to have been trimmed off the left edge, so all the picture is there, but in FCP that 'widescreen' aspect shows within a 4:3 editing window, with grey bars at the top and bottom to frame it.
An HDV clip imported directly from the camera into iMovie fills my editing window in near-enough proper 16:9 ratio (..255mm x 145mm..) and an identical clip imported into FCP HD 5.1 shows up as 120mm x 67mm, i.e: also 16:9. When the same clip is imported from FCP-capture into iMovie, then it appears as 220mm x 145mm ..i.e; wrong aspect ratio.
If you look carefully at the same frozen frame in both iMHD and in FCP, you'll see that everything within the frame is slightly -w-i-d-e-r- in the FCP frame than in the imported-into-iMHD frame ..i.e; it's squeezed narrower in iMovie.
This is because QuickTime, and any other computer display process or activity uses square pixels. Television, however, and programs associated with editing images for TV, uses rectangular pixels: short and fat in NTSC land, and tall and thin in PAL land. This is so that - in comparison to a computer-screen standard such as 640x480 for 4:3 traditionally shaped screens - a PAL TV picture, which has more scan lines, and is thus 'sharper' than an American NTSC TV, fits more data across the screen, whereas the lower-quality NTSC system, with "fatter" pixels which have less height, needs more data displayed down the screen to get to the same resolution as the equivalent square pixels.
Maybe I haven't explained that too well, as I'm in a rush right now!
But the result is - as we've both seen - that the picture in square pixels on the FCP computer screen is - when importing this into iMovie HD - understood to be meant to be "thin" PAL TV pixels, and so iMovie - or the Apple Intermediate Codec - converts that into television-intended "thin" pixels on the computer screen ..hence everything's slightly narrow, and there's a blank black spacer at the left.
I haven't time at the moment to try exporting this out to a camera, or to some other device, to see if it gets "unsqueezed" during export, but I might try tonight.
Maybe Matti Haveri might have something to say if he reads this, too.
But nothing's lost; it's just displayed thinner.
[..Maybe I could import myself into FCP and then into iMovie ..I could do with being a bit thinner, too..]
"..Should I have recaptured the footage through iMovie?.." ..Yes. But it might have taken longer, as iMovie converts into the AIC "on-the-fly", thus slowing down imports on all but the fastest Macs.