fun with aspect ratios

I meant to post this clip from Vimeo a few days ago on the blog, to get people's opinion on the final film's aspect ratio (I'd definitely watch the below clip in HD), but I got caught up with importing problems. Mo' footage, mo' problems... uhh, I'm a dork.


I had posted a question in Pedal's "All Things Geekery" forum (and Twitter'd about it) about 16:9 to 2.35:1 advice, and Karen & Jay chipped in with some how-to's.


Based on their replies; I did a quick test the other day by simply going into my timeline settings, clicking 'anamorphic' for my HDV 1080i50 footage, and then stretched the clips 134% to fill the frame.

After doing this though - I wondered if I should be scaling down my frame size in the timeline? Is it not ideal to stretch my footage out to 134%, as opposed to make the timeline's frame size closer to 100% width?

I love the way the clips look cropped though - I like having more control of what part of the image I use. I'm leaning toward editing the film in this aspect. But still open to pro's and con's. Ben left this great comment below;


I hadn't thought about how exactly some of the interview footage would frame in 2.35:1 - I've been doing some test with interview footage in FCP, and so far 90% of it works great, I'll try to post some of that footage also in the next few days. But Ben is right; it does seem to be a matter of *where* I imagine it playing. On a computer screen - I could go either way, in a theater and I'm very much in love with the wide-wide frame of 2.35:1. Decisions, decisions. What do you think?