Troubles with 16:9 and Magic Bullet in Compressor

[ehmjay]

Hello Chaps,

I'm having a bit of trouble doing some exporting with Compressor.

I have a sequence which is using lots of Magic Bullet editors which is causing ABSURDLY long render times (I read somewhere that compressor re-renders everything... which is causing my problems). The few sites I've checked mentioned to export as quicktimee reference and then to encode in Compressor. Fine. Fair game.

Problem is -- my sequence is in 16:9 and as we all know when you export from FCP to a quicktime reference movie it always exports in 4:3 (for some stupid reason).

In the past I've just changed the frame size to 843x480 as Apple says to do in one techsupport document regarding iDVD + widescreen. The problem with this is that when I went ahead and compressed a file of mine the result was an iPod ready version cropped to 640x304 -- losing a great deal of picture.

So I thought perhaps it was just some strange issue because of the 853. I switched my settings to 720x405... and again the same issue -- its going to export at 640x304. I've gone ahead and just changed the setting myself to the 16:9 aspect ratio so that it SHOULD export at 640x360

I guess my question is - what is the best way around this? Is there an easier way to just do this all in one go? Am I not setting the frame size correctly in QT? Is compressor actually re-rendering all my frames? Can I set it not to?

I really dont want to have to go through this process every time... so if anyone could help that'd be lovely!

[ehmjay]

Looks like i solved the problem myself.

All I had to do was export the file as QT Reference Movie -- not touch the dimensions, bring it into compressor and it would read it as being actually 16:9 and do it's thing.

So no need to panic.