The Nokia 5800 was the first Nokia phone that introduced 16:9 widescreen video capture. However, making widescreen videos with a 4:3 cameraphone (or any camcorder) is also easy. The 5800 captures at 640×360 pixels while a Nokia N96 captures at 640×480. With iMovie, you can easily exchange between the two sizes. This is more important to know especially since Youtube changed their pages to be more widescreen friendly.

Here’s a sample video from my Nokia N85 from last night. As you may know, the Nokia N85 captures video at 640×480 pixels or 4:3 aspect. I used iMovie to change it to widescreen format. Read on to find out how.

When you open a project, select 16:9

After dragging a clip into the project, click on the lower left corner to bring up some options, then click on “Cropping and Rotation.”

Click on ‘Crop’, because ‘Fit’ will just add black frames to the sides to make it widescreen. Move the Green box to frame your widescreen movie, then press Done.

That’s it. Your 640×480 movie is now widescreen simply by cropping it into 640×360 pixels. Putting your movies up on YouTube is easy too. Click share – Youtube. Damn I love iMovie!