[elly]

OK, I have a mac Tiger OS X, I use it primarily for my music. But - I shot a couple of little videos with an Sony HD camera and tried to use iMovie to compress it in order to upload to YouTube. Disaster! All I want is a nice little video just under 100 megs, but something keeps happening and the compressed version is squashed - what I mean is: the image is just a tad less rectangular than the original, so it's, well, squashed.
How can I avoid that? I tried H 264 etc, but still comes out squashed - I don't get it. Help!!
thanks
elly

[albloom]

Elly, Sony movies are multiplexed MPEGs. They are
a tad goofy.
I believe you can load a movie into iTunes and right-
click the entry to "convert selection for iPod." That
should take care of the problem.
Let us know if it doesn't. There are LOTS of options.

[romayfield]

Check out this link
KenStone.net. Don't read the entire article since it talks about Compressor and you are using iMovie, but I would recommend using the encoding settings that the author mentions and try and re-encode your movie for youtube. You should be successful afterwards.
Most likely, the problem is your 16x9 image is being anamorphically squeezed into a 4x3 image ratio. The tutorial in the link above should, and I say that tentatively since I haven't read the article in a while, it should fix your problem.