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With the holidays in full swing, my son has already participated in two Christmas programs - one at our church and another at his school. I filmed both of them using my Canon ZR700 in widescreen format. I had a few people at church ask me about getting a DVD of that program made, so I got the tape out the other night and started importing video. But something was wrong.

The video was being imported at 4:3, stretching the 16:9 source video. I looked through every preference panel I could find in iMovie and saw no where that I could set the video source to be Widescreen. It took some digging through the Apple discussion forums to come up with the answer, so I thought I would detail it here for everyone.

After you start iMovie (I am using iMovie HD 6), start a new project, which brings up the Create Project dialog box. At the bottom of this box, there is a small, dark gray arrow with “Video format” next to it. Clicking this arrow will reveal a list of formats to choose from, including DV Widescreen. Select this option if you are using a non-HD camera.

That is pretty much it. Its a simple option, just not very obvious.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at December 19,2007 @ 11:04 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.