Dealing with black borders on DV PAL archive footage

I’m importing DV PAL footage into my Mac from archive beta tapes using a Sony J-30SDI beta player (via Firewire) and I’m getting horrendously confused by the black borders appear on either side of my images in Final Cut X.

My question is whether I should scale the image in both X and Y dimensions, thereby maintaining the aspect ratio of the visible video image, or whether I should stretch the image in the X dimension only? The latter obviously makes objects on the screen look slightly wider, though perhaps this is what's required to for the image to have the correct dimensions?

And, more to the point, can someone explain to me what’s going on?

Is this something to do with DV PAL using non-square pixels (720 x 576), whereas FCPX is displaying the image in square pixels (768 x 576)?

However, that would suggest the two black borders should equate to (768-720)=48 pixels.

However, if I export the current frame as a graphic, the dimensions of the image are 768 × 576, and with the borders cropped it is more like 740 x 576 (ie. the black borders appear to be 28px in total).

Presumably you want to use the DV PAL media on a 16 x 9 timeline.

If the programme material is actually 4 x 3 then you will see 'pillar box' thick black bars left and right.
The picture is narrower that your project and there are two ways to reduce the black bars or to remove them:
(You could also do a horizontal stretch to fill the screen but that's nasty).

1. Place another background behind it - sometimes people use the same clip zoomed in and defocussed
2. Zoom in to lose the black bars - (you may have to shift the picture in the y direction for framing and the picture quality will suffer)

If the programme material is 16 x 9 - i.e. the pictures as imported look long and thin then you can either

1. Stretch them out to 16 x 9 in the timeline by scaling x or
2. Tell FCPX that the clip is anamorphic 16 x 9 and then it will do it for you.

To do the latter select a (4 x 3) clip in the browser and open the Inspector Info tab.
Select the Settings metadata set from the drop down menu bottom left of the inspector (You can use any view but Settings makes sense to me)
From the same menu select Edit Metadata View... and in the resulting dialogue box make sure that Anamorphic Override is ticked. Click OK to save the Settings view in its new state.

For clips that it makes sense (4 x 3 shape) for, the Anamorphic Override option now appears in the info tab of the inspector when they are selected.

Automatic is the default but you can now force FCPX to treat the clip as 16 x 9 anamorphic or as 4 x 3.

You can select multiple clips in the browser and set them all to 16 x 9 and FCPX will stretch them correctly so, if you have a lot of clips this is better than stretching them individually on the timeline or even pasting attributes as the clips are fixed 'for good' in the browser.

You might find, because of blanking errors etc. that some black remains. Zooming the clips in the timeline by a few percent will remove it.

Hope this helps,

Ian.