problem with compressing HDV clips on Mac?

[elizavetaka]

I am using iMovie and the content transferred fine. It's when I try to compress it into something biggish (just under 100 megs) for YouTube that I run into this problem - it squashes the image. The Clip looks and plays fine in its original form. When I try to compress it using h264 setting, it works but comes out slightly less rectangular than the original - squashed - so what gives? Forgive me for uneducated terms, I am just a musician.

What am I doing wrong? This is from a Sony HDV 1080i thing I borrowed from someone.

[edDV]

Squashed in what way? HDV is 16:9 1440x1080 and needs horizontal expansion to fill 1920x1080 square pixels. YouTube uses 4:3 aspect 320x240 and accepts uploaded videos in .WMV, Divx, Quicktime MOV, MPEG and .MP4, formats

[elizavetaka]

Right, well I try to compress it with the Expert settings, using the default setting for that. As a matter of fact, it comes out horizontally squashed instead of horizontally expanded, if you don't mind my primitive terms. Is there some setting in iMovie I am messing up or ignoring? I know about the YouTube requirements, and actually I followed the instructions, more or less correctly, I think. The end result is just a little..squashed.

I am converting it to quicktime movie, but it appears that when I did it to MPEG-4 it still came out not quite right. The picture's there, the sound is, too, but just a little off.

Now, when you say it needs to fill 1920X1080 square pixels, is there some setting I am missing?

Oh dear..

[edDV]

I don't have iMovie here to check menu settings. One method is to crop the 16:9 1920x1080 square pixel frame to 4:3 1440x1080 before shrinking down.