Please Help - Want to Keep Video at "normal" Size

Question

Hi I would appreciate if there is a solution for this very much !!!
I am making a movie in iMovie for my mums 60th Birthday the idea is to get a loads of people and relatives to leave a video birthday message which she will be able to watch on her Birthday as she is going on holiday to celibrate.
My Issue is some people have used low quality camera's to record there message and they have no access to any better equipment, when I drag these movies into iMovie it streaches the to full screen, making the video worthless is there a way in iMovie of keeping the original size (120x200 or something) and leave a big black border so that at least it will be viewable.
Also as a second issue someone has shot there video in Portrait therfore is there a way of rotating the whole video 90 deg?
Thanks for any coment or sugestions.

Answer 1

My Issue is some people have used low quality camera's to record there message and they have no access to any better equipment, when I drag these movies into iMovie it streaches the to full screen, making the video worthless is there a way in iMovie of keeping the original size (120x200 or something) and leave a big black border so that at least it will be viewable.
Sounds like you want to "letterbox" your source file. An interesting problem but one easily solved if you have the required resources -- QT Pro, any basic graphic application, and a third party video converter utility if required. To start off, the source file should be in a "fully supported QT compression format which can be imported into iMovie '08. Since you indicate your files can be imported but are rescaled, this is not a problem for you. (If it had been, you would simply have converted the file to a "fully supported" QT compression format using QT Pro or a third-party utility if needed.) The rest of the process is really quite simple:
1) Open your iMovie '08 compatible source file in QT Pro.
2) Open your graphic application and create your "black background." It must be the same size/aspect ratio at the project you are working on iMovie '08.
3) Once the background is created, select it (by pressiong "Command-A" in most graphic applications) and place it in memory (by pressing "Command-C" in most graphic applications).
4) Now switch to QT Pro, open an new player (press "Command-N"), and paste the black background into the new player (press "Command-V") to turn it into a single frame movie clip.
5) While the entire movie clip is already selected (if not still selected, press "Command-A" again to re-select it in the new player), press "Command-C" to place the background "clip" in memory.
6) Now activate your source movie clip by clicking on its frame and with the playhead set to the beginning of the source movie use the "Add to Selection & scale" Edit menu option to create a background track of the same length as your source movie.
7) Now open the "Show Movie Properties" window, select the newly added video track ("Video Track 2") in the upper half of the window, and select the "Visual Settings" tab in the lower half of the window.
8) Change the "Layer" setting for this track from -1 to 1 to place it behind your source video track.
9) Now select the source video track ("Video Track 1"), enter the correct "Offset" to center your source file over the background, and save the resulting file. Offsets = 0.5 x (width of background - width of source) and 0.5 x (height of background - height of source)
Now it is just a matter of importing the clip to iMovie '08 and editing as you normally would.
Also as a second issue someone has shot there video in Portrait therfore is there a way of rotating the whole video 90 deg?
Also very simple if you have QT Pro. In step 1 above, open the "Show Movie Properties" window, select the video track in the upper half of the window, select the "Visual Settings" tab in the lower half of the window, and press the appropriate "Flip/Rotate" button to correct the video orientation. This must be done before adding your background whis is assumed to be larger than your source clip in its new orientation.