Importing clips of all different shapes and sizes

Question

I'm completely new to final cut pro and in fact not a film person at all but audio so please be patient.
What I'm doing is creating a film montage. The clips I'm compiling together happen to be a few different sizes of widescreen and then some full screen. I want them all to match and I don't really care which version it ends up as.
I did manage to export one of my full screen videos to a 720x480 format but the quality afterwards was really awful.
Any suggestions??

Answer 1

MaggieBigelow wrote:
I'm completely new to final cut pro and in fact not a film person at all but audio so please be patient.< </div>
"New" is a red flag around here. We can't educate you about video. This is where you learn how to fix stuff that happens when you use FCP. You'er an audio guy? You understand how difficult it would be to tell a newbie all about s/n and decibels and mic/line levels when they say, "I've never used Logic before, in fact, I don't know anything about audio. I'm a print guy."
What I'm doing is creating a film montage. The clips I'm compiling together happen to be a few
different sizes of widescreen and then some full screen. I want them all to match and I don't really
care which version it ends up as.< </div>
The screen formats are irrelvant. what we need to know are two things: a) what are the source codecs of these clips and, b) what is the target codec for your end product—how will you use it?
I did manage to export one of my full screen videos to a 720x480 format but the quality
afterwards was really awful.
Umm, that suggests you were using some high quality formats and have scaled them way down to standard definition DV. If you had 4 bit, 8 bit and 16 bit audio from MP3, DV, AIFF, analog 45rpm and 33rpm disks, and some files recorded off someone's iPhone in a disco bar, which one of them would you consider to be the standard you would try to make them all match?
bogiesan