I had an issue recently where I was trying to apply a 1.78 widescreen matte filter to a clip that had been rotated a few degrees. FCP’s widescreen filter will rotate with the clip, so that’s no good. One other option would be to create a slug on V2 (or a higher track), and apply a mask shape to the slug that matches the letterboxing applied to your other clips…but it is a bit of a pain to do on multiple clips. Too many steps.

So I was poking around on the Apple discussion forums and I ran across a free filter called Letterboxer.

It’s a video generator that you simply drop onto a higher track and it creates a widescreen mask automatically. And since it’s on a different track, you can play with rotation on clips below it, and the mask stays perfectly horizontal.

One caveat; I think the author wrote it for PAL format, because the matte presets don’t match my FCP widescreen presets. But there is a Custom option, you can simply type in a value. For instance, a Custom setting of 2.04 matches up to my 1.78 matte quite nicely.

The filter is compatible with FCP4+ (runs great on FCP Studio). Once you install the plugin, it just shows up as a Video Generator, under “Others”.

http://www.rienq.dds.nl/fcp/index.html