I recently acquired Final Cut Pro and my concern is that when attempting to download old footage from cine or standard 8, that is 4:9 aspect. There does not appear to be a way of instructing F C Pro to automatically convert images to 16:9 ratio?

Question

Mac Book Pro version (10.6.i) Snow Leopard.
I am an inexperience user and recently acquired Final Cut Pro to supplement my Imove application.
My question is - How can I instruct F C Pro to automatically convert 4:9 aspect material (old cine and standard 8 recordings) to 16:9 aspect.
At the moment I am adjusting each clip manually to fit 16:9, not a very good way to proceed! I have no problem with Imovie in this respect and wonder if
F C Pro offers the same facillity? Can not find any clues either from Apple store or elsewhere.

Answer 1

You mean 14:9, right?? 8mm film frame aspect ratio is  1.58. I find it hard to believe that your telecined video has the same aspect as the original film unless it has been explicitly trimmed to those dimensions. If that's the case, it's pillarboxed in the 16:9 format or letterboxed in the 4:3 format.
You could try to select all your clips and in the Video Inspector > Spatial Conform, select Fill. This will cause your clips to expand to fill the 16:9 "space". This also means that portions of the edges will "overflow" the boundaries of the modern frame (most likely the top and bottom edges.) It shouldn't be that much and if you're telecined film is letterboxed in 4:3, it will be a lot less so afterwards!
You can also select all your clips, assuming they are all the same dimensions, and adjust the (Video > Transform > ) Scale in "one throw" (if you turn down the disclosure triangle you can adjust width and height independently—I am assuming that since you want it to fit, you don't mind minor stretching.)