Your big ass widescreen TV at home has a progressive stretch mode that you can switch on when your watching normal 4:3 broadcasts ... it makes the picture fill that gloriously wide screen without everything seeming too obviously stretched.  So how does that work?  It uses a proprietary pixel stretching algorithm to leave the center of the screen relatively undistorted whilst stretching the pixels more and more the nearer they approach the edge of the screen.  OK, so how does this plug-in work? Errrm ... pretty much the same way only with a bit less of the old “proprietary algorithm” business in there (I just use one of Apple’s built in distortion function calls).

Originally called Andy’s Fake Anamorphic Fixer, its now completely rewritten and reborn under this new name. Although still far from perfect I like to think it’s a lot better in this new incarnation, with much more control over where and how much stretch to apply.

I’ve added in as much user definable control as possible so that you can make the most of the image that you have... but obviously the more “extremely” you use it the less pleasant the result is going to be.  Much, of course, depends on the source composition and the action thats happening within the frame, but i’ve had great results using this on interview footage where I’ve been able to keep the interviewee in near perfect aspect whilst stretching an otherwise abstract background.

The basic prerequisite for using this effect properly is first to tell FCP to stretch your otherwise 4:3 clip to fill your 16:9 sequence. You can either add the Anamorphic flag to clip in the clip’s properties before you use it in your sequence, or you can edit it as is into your 16:9 timeline then setting the instances Motion tab > Distort > Aspect Ratio property to zero.

Tip: Enable the “Show Protected Area” option so you can more easily define the region to protect ... but don’t forget to disable it again before you render your final output!

Tip: Go real easy on the Elasticity control. The slider is unrestricted to allow you more creative control, but values above 10 are really not recommended ... they will overcompensate, causing a compression of the image at the edges of the protected area.

Tip: Use the Protection Override slider to put a bit of stretch back into the otherwise protected area of the image... a little bit of stretch will likely go unnoticed and will help greatly in reducing apparent disparity of distortion.