Resizing your stills before bringing them in FCP will in no way solve the problem you are having (black borders on both sides in Youtube video). You can easily scale any still up or down right inside FCP anyway.

Having set your sequence settings correctly is the first step. When your picture looks okay in FCP using the settings I posted, the next step is to export it correctly for YouTube. There are different ways you can do this in FCP7.

When you use the Share to Youtube option your H.264 file is exported straight from the timeline. And YES this can cause unexpected display results if your sequence Pixel Aspect Ratio is not set correctly (especially when your sequence is set to Anamorphic like you did in your original settings). So the first thing I would do is export your video from the new sequence (using the appropriate settings) and see if this solves your problem. If this does not solve your problem we can give you some other methods for exporting to Youtube. But please try this first so we can find out where the problem is.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Hi Starfox,

Your video indeed looks fine now in Youtube

If you are using exactly the same settings to make your new projects with video and the video comes out badly the logical question is: what is wrong with the video. So we would need some information on this.

Open a project where you use the video files. R-click an imported video in your FCP Browser and select Item Properties > Format. The Properties window will open. Make a screenshot of it and post it here so we can have a look at it.

Best wishes,

Ronny

The video clips i am using are all mp4 format downloaded from vimeo.

That's what I thought when I first saw your specs. I think you have recorded videos posted on Vimeo using a screen recorder? That's a guarantee for bad quality in the first place. If you look at the screenshot from your original clip you already can see that it is very low quality and there are lots of artifacts.

Although videos posted on a movie platform such as youtube or video may look quite good when viewed on the platform they are already very compressed. Further compression, once by your video capture device using H.264 at a low bitrate of 17kbs, once again when rendering and finally when recompressing again for Vimeo, will quickly further degrade the original.

If you want to produce good looking video for the web you really must start with the best quality original media you can get. Screen captures from a video platform are not good enough.

Best wishes,

Ronny

your video capture device using H.264 at a low bitrate of 17kbs