How To Create 16:9 Movie With 4:3 Cameraphones Like Nokia N96, N85, etc. Using iMovie

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
16x 9 Ratio

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

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.
Cropping 1

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!

  • Awesome!!! :)
  • Andrew
    This technique is so simple for Mac users but WMM is absolutely useless. V_V

    I had to use my friends comp and use Adobe Premier Elements just to crop my N82's videos to 16:9.
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