Is there a way to "center" video for DVD distribution?

Question

This may be a long story so hear me out...
For the past year or so, after every great sports win by my alma mater Michigan State University I make a highlight video for web distribution. My workflow for doing so goes like this:
1. Record straight to DVD from Tivo or live TV using Panasonic ES10 recorder
2. Extract clips using Cinematize (uncompressed full quality setting, automatic adjustment 640x480)
3. Import clips into Final Cut Pro and edit
4. Export full quality uncompressed Quicktime
5. Export H.264 for web viewing
Well this work has found the attention of someone in the East Lansing (where MSU is) city council. They would like me to throw together a short little video to be played at bars in East Lansing after the MSU mens basketball tournament games.
I have done a few tests simply taking the uncompressed Final Cut exports and making a DVD in iDVD out of them. The results, while OK, aren't the best. I'm thinking there isn't much I can do there because I'm not working with the best source material (going through a number of compressions - Tivo, DVD recorder, iDVD, etc).
But one thing I did notice though is my fancy iDVD created menu looked pretty slick with the video scaled down. The video was crisp and clear.
Is there a way to scale my video down so that it doesn't play full screen? Almost doing a 4-sided letterbox. I'm envisioning the video scaled down, centered on the TV.

Answer 1

Yes, I think I understand what you want to do...
You can scale the video down or up to pretty much any size you would want to use;
When your video is in the timeline, double click it, and it will open in one of the video preview windows (I belive its called the "viewer" window), for me on my dual screen, its the one on the left;
A few tabs will appear at the top of the the Viewer window, Video, Filters and Motion; Click on the motion Tab...
When there the video will disappear a time line where keyframes live will appear, since you have not used key frames in this clip for motion, there will not be any there;
You will see to the left of this a few pull downs, Basic Motion, Crop, Distort, Opacity, Drop Shadow and Time Remap;
When you have the basic Motion twisty selected, you will see, Scale, Rotation, Center and Anchor Point;
The one your interested in for what I belive you wan to do is Scale. You can click in the box that defaults to 100 (meaning 100 percent) and change this to anything you want.
By changing it this once it will make the entire clip play at that new scale. You can get creative and keyframe it over time using the little diamond shape button with the right and left arrow on each side. You can add a key frame at any point int he time line; and it will scale (in this case) to each setting you have set a key for. It interpolates the scale at each point in the time line when you set different scales etc... you can fiddle with this and get some good ideas for other projects if you want;
For what I belive you asked for, no key frame is required as you want it to start and finish att he same reduced scale.
I trust this helps you out, and hopefully I read your question correctly;
p.s. if you leave the Center at 0, and 0 it will be centred, but its important to note you can use that to chance the position of the video in the video frame, again not needed for your request - but handy to know....
tk