The pixel aspect ratio change likely was showing you the correct aspect ratio for the first time. References to this adapter creating 2.35:1 or 2.39:1 frames once un-squeezing the 16:9 frame are incorrect assumptions. Truthfully, I don't know how they ever got started when the math is right there:

1920*1.33 = 2553.6 ...so... 2554 / 1080 = 2.3648

At this point, depending on where you choose to round and how far you carry the decimals, you're looking at either 2.36:1 or 2.37:1 which means a frame height of either 810 or 814 if you reduce to fit on a standard HD frame. For a reduction to a standard 2K frame you're looking at something more like 2048 x 868 for the scope area. Make no mistake though, you're reducing, not up-rezzing.

I wouldn't suggest doing any of this prior to editing though. You'd just making the whole process less efficient. I would assume FCP could interpret the footage on the fly like you can in CS6 products. There's really no reason to hard-code or bake in the un-squeeze at any point during the process. Let the software work for you. 1.33X footage though, there's really no hardship in viewing squeezed editorial even if for some reason FCP had such an oversight as to not allow you to re-interpret footage on the fly.

I've shifted my own post pipeline for anamorphic so that I'm always working with squeezed files, which is consistent with how digital post is conducted on anamorphic film projects. Maintaining the footage as "squeezed" for as long as possible in the workflow keeps the data more manageable and keeps the quality intact. I only generate a non-anamorphic version when creating a version for upload to the web. In your case this would be in the final render to the DCP JPEG 2K files.

edit: TLDR version, there's no reason to have a 2K workflow, stick with 1920x1080 squeezed files clear through to final grade renders. Then you'll have a version that you can conform at the highest quality to whatever you need and you don't unnecessarily bog down editing or finishing and you never degrade your image quality.

@kellar42

We're saying that we're really getting closer to the old 2.35:1 scope than the modern 2.40:1, right, which explains why the plugins that have a 'widescreen' button for non anamorphic footage to be cropped are slightly wider than my 'native' pixel aspect ratio change footage with the adapter. This is 'ok', though, with a feature shot 80% with a 1.33x adapter, there is no reason to use anything else than it's 2.36:1 or 2.37:1 ratio, right? Just crop the non-anamorphic footage properly? As long as my horizontal dimensions are correct, any projector will take the footage?

Absolutely. I think there's actually two different paths you could take for the DCP though. You could just crop your non-ana footage to 2.36:1 and mix it in with the anamorphic and have this centered on what appears to be the standard "full container" 2K DCP frame size of 2048x1080 and you'll be projecting a letterbox image. There are also "scope" versions of the spec, it seems, where you could incur a very slight top and bottom crop on the un-squeezed anamorphic footage to 2048x858 and match this crop on your non-ana footage and write this 2.39:1 version to the DCP spec filestream.

Most of the generic, pre-built anamorphic options in most software are likely to just assuming a 2X ratio, since that's the most common being shot (Panavision, et al). I'm sure Century Optics and Panasonic, in their wildest dreams, never thought their original 16:9 adapters were going to be used this far in the future, on cameras so different from the 4:3 DV cameras for which they were originally intended. It's just by happenstance that we now have native 16:9 cameras that turn them into a more pleasingly cinematic aspect ratio and it's just luck that this approaches the most common format.

I'd expect later on (hopefully) when we see built-in anamorphic handling the software is aware of and gives you a choice of everything from 1.25x/1.33x/1.5x/1.75x/2x to cover most all of the bases, since it should be no more of a burden to handle one more than the other.

Anyway, it didn't click that you were also conforming non-anamorphic. That does create a slightly different wrinkle but if the ratio of footage is as you're saying, I'd "blow up" the non-anamorphic stuff and sharpen and then deal with an anamorphic workflow as if it were all shot that way rather than conform down to the lesser spec footage. That way your scope footage stays 100% quality and your workflow stays as low impact as possible.

...

Yes, when you work with the correct pixel aspect ratio the frame size doesn't actually change, it's just a flag that tells the software how to display the footage. Similarly, back in the DV and other 601 days folks were working with 720x480 frames that had a 0.89 pixel aspect ratio which took the 1.42:1 file and created a 1.33:1 frame. You never actually conformed the image to 640x480 unless you intended for it to be viewed without distortion on a computer or in print. I couldn't tell you why they decided to standardize on a non-square pixel but those who chose to ignore this fact would invariably, at some time, wonder why their circles were no longer circles.

When you get to the step where you down-rez to the 2048 width, final DCP files, handling the pixel aspect ratio is more or less incidental because you're, ultimately, squeezing the vertical 1080 portion of the frame and only slightly expanding the 1920 portion of the frame. The net result is a sharper, filtered result than if you had first expanded out to 2554 and then proportionally scaled down to a 2048 width. Not to confuse you, just trying to be thorough, there is software out there that concatenate all transformations that the user applies to footage as a series of steps into one which would save the user from themselves and give you the same quality as the one-step process to get to "flat" 2048 DCP frames (they do this with color operations applied as a series of serial steps too) I just don't know which apps, besides Nuke, are this smart under the hood.

...

With disk at no shortage and horsepower to spare, I dunno. I'm just thinking that keeping it anamorphic through and through, and then making various specifically targeted non-scope versions keeps you flexible. Once you arrive at your graded, 1920x1080 anamorphic master, ideally as something like ProRes 444, then it's just a matter of re-running that through anything that can use one of the DCP plug-ins and scale at the same time to arrive at your 2K. Later you'd be able to do the same to generate a BD version or DVD version, all of which have different colorspaces and frame sizes to conform to and getting to any one of them your lovely anamorphic footage is only ever transformed and filtered one time, ever, for each targeted version.

That said, if you're paying for suite time and have an operator that just isn't familiar with anamorphic and so they're just going to be distracted the whole time by their feelings of, "am I breaking it? am I doing this right?" then maybe a conform of everything prior to editorial to un-squeezed 2K wouldn't be so bad. Their not being comfortable costing you more money doesn't help anyone.

If they really have horsepower to spare it might be worth seeing if they could handle 2554x1080 frames and you master all the way through with that. There are slight advantages to doing it this way (*) but the footage becomes really heavy.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts. I could be missing something somewhere.

• • working to such a large, unsqueezed frame means you could apply non-anamorphic grain at this resolution which could lend the "feeling" of additional detail, where otherwise you'd have the standard phenomenon, in projection, of horizontally stretched grain. You could also, though I haven't tried myself, get a slightly different, maybe better, maybe no worse, result from doing your sharpening and/or chroma filtering at the un-squeezed frame size versus the squeezed frame size, plus the addition of the non-squeezed grain. We're talking really subtle differences though.

@kellar42

The one bit I'm not following is how you get to 2554x1080 considering the below? What's the workflow to unsqueeze and change the frame size at the same time? My inclination is to go the final route you mention but I haven't followed how to create those sized frames without a kind of weird two step up-res.

Two methods I'd consider:

1) After Effects *- load the footage and drop it on the "Create New Composition" button.

*- ensure your composite is in the appropriate color space and 32bit

*- open the composition properties dialog and change its resolution from 1920x1080 to 2554x1080

*- select your clip (which now should appear "pillar boxed"), go to the Transformation options and you'll see the option to scale it to the composition size. I'd select the option to make it fit the composition horizontally just to be anal

*- now your footage is scaled so you output it to at least ProRes 422HQ

2) MPEG Streamclip *- load the footage

*-export to Quicktime

*-select at least ProRes 422HQ and an output size of 2554x1080

...the scaling to its un-squeezed, full-resolution size isn't tricky at all and only requires one transformation step. Load>Scale>Save. Badda-Bing.

Yeah, that's the un-squeezed frame size keeping the full height of the native frame. That's why, for the same aspect ratio, there's more information in an anamorphic image than shooting flat and cropping.

When you do a reduction you're still getting a better quality widescreen image compared to cropping but the difference isn't huge. Then you're retaining the aesthetic quality of the glass and how different it looks compared to flat photography cropped to the same aspect ratio.

One interesting little note...above when I wrote about running through compressor at 1.33 pixels and getting something taller than my changing vertical scale to 76%, or using the Cinelook 'widescreen' plugin and we thought that might make some sense, I think I was wrong. This 2554x1080 file is almost identical to the plugin, it translates to a 75% scale in FCPX (which explains why all the things I've been putting out at 76 have looked ok), which means the plugin guys going for an old film look are probably putting out 2.35:1 and I am getting 2.36:1 out of After Effects. This is good news, and comprehensible to me. Don't tell me I'm missing something, haha!

It does help, it does!

And there appears to be a path to batch processing with compressor. By changing the geometry to 2554x1080 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.33x, I can duplicate the AE results, and the quality actually looks a touch higher on Compressor. (That maybe just because of this computer, where I only rendered out from AE to animation).

That means I can make a droplet and just drop all stuff on it.

In FCPX, the 2554x1080 files can be dropped into a 2k timeline for editing (just hit 'fill' on spacial conform), or, one can use the 'open in timeline' workaround to get a 2554x1080 compound clip and edit entire sequences that way.

In fact, one can create the 2554x1080 compound clip, drop a 1920x1080 still-squeezed file into that timeline, change the horizontal scale to 80% and approximate the same thing and exports to 2554x1080. Not clear if there is a slight quality loss doing it this way vs doing it in compressor, yet, however.

Exciting stuff! Does present some challenges...noticed my gorilla grain doesn't work properly on a 2K timeline, for instance, I'm sure little things like that will pop up...

Investigate about do the resample in a linear space, this make better results, but AE default interpolation is bilinear :S maybe some Avisynth genie here to do it on a linear gamma?

@BurnetRhoades I know, I know, this ran through my head while doing it as well, but must be a compressor setting quirk, when I change the geometry to 2554x1080 but leave the pixel aspect ratio nothing happens...doesn't un-squeeze, but when I change both it gives me a perfect match of the After Effects footage :/.

Whatever is happening in compressor, once I understand why or get it right, I agree it'll be better than FCPX in the long run.

I almost prefaced my last post with 'I don't understand why this works, but this is what I'm finding...' haha...

@heradicattor in Compressor linear is listed as 'better' for resizing quality and 'statistical prediction' as best. I've been using the later. Should I not be? I like the compressor results better than AE so far but I thought that might have been the way I exported from AE.

@Kellar42 Try 2580x1080 2,40.1 (2,39) standard pro res 4444

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)