One of the questions we get a lot is how we get videos cropped the way we do. With that super crazy widescreen look. Right off the bat let me say that I’m sure there are other ways to get videos to look like this, but this is the way we’ve found works best for us.
So here’s the clip we’re goin to use

Once we’ve gone through and edited our video, we then go to our effects Bin.

We open the Video Filters, and then open the folder called Matte. (is it bad that we can’t remember if this set of plugins come with FCP or not? We’ve got a ton of plugins and kind of forget which ones originally came with FCP, but we know we’ve been using this plugin since we’ve had FCP.)

Then we drag the plugin called Widescreen down to our clip. This is where the magic starts:) If the only plugin you have applied to your clip is the widescreen plugin, then your filters window should look like this.

The first option you see is [TYPE]
This is where you decide how crazy you want to get when it comes to your widescreen plugin. Everyone’s different and different options work for different scenarios. Here are the 3 different [TYPE]‘s we use most.
2.35 : 1

2.55 : 1

3.00 : 1

The next option we use a lot is [Offset]
[Offset] determines what part of your clip is shown. If we moved the slider all the way to the left our clip would look like this

if we moved our slider all the way to the right our clip would look like this.

So you can see how, not only can the widescreen plugin give your video a completely different feel, but changing the offset can also be a big factor.
Set-up for Vimeo
So if you export this clip like you always do and tried to upload it to vimeo, then you’d still have the black bars, which if your’e cool with that then you’re finished:)
But we just don’t really like the bars, so what we do is export our clip from FCP and then open up the exported clip with Quicktime Player 7 (we haven’t been able to get the new quicktime player to export clips like we want.)
Once we’ve got the clip in Quicktime we go to [FILE] and then click [EXPORT]
You should get a window that looks like this one.

You want to be sure your export is set to [MOVIE TO MPEG-4] and then click [OPTIONS…]
Below you can see all of our settings. Now keep in mind that these settings are for when we use the widescreen [TYPE] of 2.55 : 1

Once all of the settings are set and ready to go we click [OK] and then we set where we want our clip to export to, and click [SAVE]
Once quicktime does its thing we upload the exported file to vimeo, and have our super crazy widescreen look:)
Hope this has been helpful!