Problem with iDVD Fullscreen playing as Widescreen

I love the internet. You can nearly alway find an answer to your problems, as long as you keep trying different search terms in Google until it returns what you want.

Over the weekend I was building a simple DVD in iDVD. There was ONE video clip - and admittedly it was a PAL project, and the video was originally in NTSC DV format - but there was no reason why it shouldn't work.

But I selected a 4:3 project, added the clip, and when the clip played in Preview, it was displayed as though it was a widescreen clip (with text even warning that it was in Widescreen Preview at the bottom of the preview screen.)

I tried exporting the clip in PAL format from Final Cut, and that had the same problem. Tried creating a new project and that didn't help either... I even burned the disc to confirm that, yes, the disc played back "wrong."

The first couple of searches "iDVD widescreen problem" and "iDVD 4:3 widescreen problem" didn't bring anything up; sending me to some help forums on unrelated topics. But changing 4:3 to fullscreen, turned up the following post (on an Apple forum):
After looking at several threads about this I decided to try another approach. I opened the video I exported from FCP in the Quicktime player and it showed that it was a 4:3 movie. So I re-saved it as a self-contained movie and put that into iDVD. It seems to have worked. Obviously you need the pro version of Quicktime player to do this but anyone with FCP should have the pro QP. Hope this helps.
Funny how a simple change in your search terms can make a huge difference!

And as mad as it sounds, simply opening the movie in QuickTime Player and doing a Save As to create a new copy of the movie (and not changing anything else!) fixed the problem!!

I don't think I would have thought of that in a million years!

Apple Discussions: widescreen preview mode, how to disable?


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